Goodbye Gauteng! (Part 2 of 2)

After spending the morning securing a respectable caffeine dose and organising my schedule for the next two days, I sat down to watch some of The Heartbreak Kid in the backpacker lodge TV room. From there, it was off to Hatfield Plaza to grab some stuff for a picnic party.

At this point, I was reunited with the Bat Cave geek crew, who had apparently spent most of the week doing loads of awesome stuff while I sat at my grandparents' home catching up on some freelance work. Bugger. Still, I did not allow envy to get the better of me as we prepared for a party in Zita Park to celebrate the additional yearing of one of my friends.

Ironically enough, said party would entail lots of sun and exercise – oh dearie me, how stereotyping groans under the weight of our awesomeness!

My photographic intentions were benign. Danny's bum is purely a bonus extra.

We ended up playing a game of Froccer – a made-up sport which kinda happens to be a mixture between Ultimate Frisbee and netball. Although my friends originally created it to circumvent the “no ballgames” rule back on their old University campus grounds, I was intrigued to discover that similar ideas have also cropped up elsewhere.

The goal of Froccer is to get the “ball” (a frisbee) to touch an enemy team's goal post while protecting your own. Whoever holds the frisbee isn't allowed to move, meaning that the only way to reliably get it across the field is to toss it over to team mates. If the frisbee hits the ground, the team who touched it last gets penalised.

Froccer can end up being quite exhausting, unless you're cunning like me and opt to sit back as a goal keeper of sorts. But it felt good to get some proper exercise and although I communicated exclusively with pants, grunts and whines during the game itself I actually had quite a bit of fun overall. Still, flopping back onto the picnic mats and getting some snacks and drinks afterwards did feel like pure heaven.

The meal afterwards was social and free of buttshots.

As evening approached, we went back to the birthday boy's pad for some swimming and a session of Whose Line Is It Anyway? consisting mainly of improv scenes and well-worn memes. We all had a great time, though regrettably it was at this point that my camera decided to choke up and start making funny noises. Five minutes later, it ceased to function.

A moment of silence for my poor departed camera.

My Optio S40 has had a good run – it was already old when I bought it second-hand a few years back – and while it wasn't the best of cameras, it did its job and I am sad to see it go.

Still, I acknowledge the need to move on and I'll be hunting down a replacement camera as soon as I get to Cape Town. I'm taking the bus in a little over two hours and will probably make do with my cellphone camera until I get my hands on a new point-and-shooter.

And now it's time for me to bugger off. I need to get some packing done before my harrowing overnight journey to the west coast. I look forward to the new location – I've spent a good three weeks up in Pretoria already – but I'm still apprehensive about the upcoming night of horrific sleeping positions, crying babies and stinky passengers. Wish me luck, dear reader. I'll see you again on the other side.