Scott and Jane are walking their two labs around the Botanical Gardens for 3 hours...actually the dogs were walking us! We also took a behind the scenes tour of the Sanctuary in the Yarra Valley (wine country outside of Melbourne) where they are breeding the Tasmanian Devils to protect them from extinction from a mouth cancer and then they will repopulate them back into Tasmania...





40 DEGREES LATITUDE-TASMANIA! Margo talked me into going and what a great idea! Beautiful unspoiled beaches, much more temperate climate than we expected, we played 2 amazing links courses (Barnbougle is ranked in top 100 new courses and Lost Farm) and then headed over to the east coast to meet up with Handkes and Cathcarts from Cleveland at Freycinet Lodge. It seemed easier to meet in Tasmania than the US! Haha! We spent 4 days in Tasmania and had a ball! Fresh oysters every night with Tasmanian wines. We saw wallabies and wombats at night and as roadkill by day!


SOUTH AFRICA- We took a long 15 hour flight to South Africa for our 4 night safari.
The time changed helped us to arrive at the safari as we woke up the first night at 1am and were ready to go at 5am on our first morning's game drive. Pfinda, a private game reserve run by

a company called " &Beyond" and had come highly recommended and lived up to every accolade. The name Pfinda means "the return" in Zulu and the area had been ruined in the 50's and 60's from DDT driving away all the animals. It is a very unique story. With the help of Getty money the land was returned to its original use and the animals returned and repopulated and then they built 6 incredible lodges (ours was called Vlei Lodge which can handle 12 people max) and then returned the entire property to the local Zulu community. They have funded schools(one of which we visited), water systems, and also hire 2/3 of their staff from the Zulu population. We visited the school and the village. We brought the children lollipops and were a big hit.