FIRST 24 HOURS (25th to 26th September)

Day one and six excited Felsted students and two teachers assemble at the armoury carpark - and the minibus drives away five minutes early! Almost unheard of - but it's not everyday that Felsted students have the opportunity to travel to South Africa to represent their school in an international student conference. The sense of excitement is tangible.

The journey to the airport proceeds without a hitch (even the M25 is in a good mood today!) with the only minor difficulty so far being the necessity of checking in the Felsted flagpole as excess baggage.

In the air, and a short hop and a Danish pastry sees us in Frankfurt, where we have the opportunity to buy pizza and relax before the ten hour overnight flight to Johannesburg.

The plane leaves on time and hooray, it's one of the ones with a full personal all singing all dancing touchscreen i-pod/DVD/watching-by-camera-out-of-the-front-of-the-plane facility. Even the food is good. The company is good. The view is good (till it gets dark). Life is good!

A bleary-eyed landing in Johannesburg and a long passport queue and there we all are - and there's all of our luggage, and ... hey, wait a minute, what's happened to the Felsted flagpole? Has it, perchance, decided on an extended holiday in Frankfurt?! Half an hour later and it still hasn't appeared and we decide that boarding our bus for the four hour journey to Penryn School is more important than trying to track down an errant and rather irritating piece of wood - and off we go.

En route, we arrive at a roadhouse for lunch and whilst the rest of us are queueing for cheeseburgers, Tim advises us loudly that the gents toilet facilities really must be investigated! Curious, and expecting some sort of substandard, developing world, hole in the ground facility, the author of this blog entry decides to check it out. So there, on the wall, as usual are perfectly normal urinals. So what's different? Well, the wall is simply a window ... and right there on the other side of the glass ... rhino ... buffalo ... ostrich!


Tom Vignoles
Felsted School 
Deputy Head (Co-Curricular)