Your day on a Sketchbook Safari starts early as you want to catch the animals on their way to the waterholes at dawn. You get a wake-up call -- with coffee -- and then as dawn breaks you all head out in a 4x4 game-viewing vehicle with a guide. Although by midday it’ll be sunny and warm, this time of the morning it’s very cold and you’ll soon appreciate the warm blanket to wrap around yourself!
You spend several hours driving around observing the wildlife (punctuated by a coffee break, and a bush stop if you need it). How long you spend with a group of animals is dictated by the group. One morning we spent a long time looking at the social interactions in a group of impala, an animal all too often dismissed as uninteresting because you see them frequently. When you get back from the morning’s game drive, breakfast is waiting.
Having Katie there to draw your attention to the small things, to show you the finer points of observation and how to get it down in your sketches, adds enormously to the encounters. It does take a bit of effort not to feel self-conscious about what you’re getting down in your sketchbook when you’re sitting in a vehicle with a group, however, and to remind yourself that it’s not a competition. Again, this is where Katie’s teaching skill shows itself, as she encourages and pushes you.
