Last month I headed out of the office for a very exciting trip to South Africa. I was really looking forward to the trip as I visited South Africa on my own gap year (a few years ago now) and loved it so was keen to see whether it had changed much. I visited a number of our programmes but started off with our South Africa monkeys programme. I had extremely high hopes as I had heard so much about it from my colleagues who have visited the programme before and it certainly didn’t disappoint.
I met lots of wonderful Oyster volunteers who were spending their summer breaks helping out this fantastic programme and of course I got stuck in with the volunteer tasks but it has to be said that the real highlight was meeting the monkeys and baboons. I made friends with one of the baby vervets, Mia, very quickly and had a great time watching the young baboons playing, fighting and generally getting into lots of mischief. I think I could have spent hours watching the way that these incredible animals interact with one another (something I think the vast majority of our volunteers consider a highlight).
I am sharing some of my photos from the trip today. It has to be said that one of the main things that I learnt was that monkeys and baboons are not always the most willing subjects for photos and they make taking anything but blurry photos quite a challenge.
If you would like to get involved in the programme you can find out more on our website.
Daughter and I going out in April – just can’t wait- so excited!