Making Waves

The morning of Day Four feels considerably warmer to me. Because I have to catch up on e-mails and admin early on, I miss out on the 6.30am call time (bummer) and end up having a quick breakfast by myself at about 8.30am. By 11am, I’m making my way up and down zillions of stairs to the Valley Of The Waves, where the crew has spent a very productive morning shooting AC Activewear. My bag of snacks is welcomed with far more enthusiasm than I am, and is demolished in less than 10 minutes – clearly I’m not the only person obsessed with food on this trip.

Her work for the morning done, Avril has a snooze on the sand. In the meantime, Mignonne shows us the tricks she’s learnt from the monkeys that have been such a prominent feature of our stay at Sun City by scaling the lifeguard’s tower. (The lifeguard himself is on the other side of the wave pool with a pair of binoculars trained in her direction, rather than in the direction of the lone swimmer.) This is the setting for part one of the Guess shoot; part two takes place in the pool itself, leaving me grateful again that I’m not the one getting wet.

As we make our way out of the Valley, we throw a couple of hissy glances at the crew from FHM who are here to shoot lingerie. They’re scouting locations and, by the looks of them, are not above playing dirty in a turf war.

Lunch is a quickie before we head out to the Cascades hotel and make our way to the swing bridge for some more Guess work. The boys on the crew behave in a far more mature way than they did during the reccie and the bridge remains, for the most part, motionless. There are several monkeys around, undoubtedly drawn by the snack basket, and while they keep an eye on our food, makeup artist Kelly Boers keeps an even closer eye on them to make sure they stay out of her kit. A rather strange man swans onto the set and starts snapping away with a camera phone, before Ian chases him away with some well-chosen phrases.

Then it’s off to Waterworld for a bit of Havaianas fun. The shoot goes quickly; while we wait for transport, Dean shows off his gymnastic past with some somersaults and the 10-year-olds inside all of us come out to play on a kids’ slide. This keeps us busy until the van arrives to take us back to the hotel.

We all have tickets to the 8pm show at the Sun City Theatre, but I feel myself falling asleep over my plate of minestrone (which, due to somebody’s misguided idea of soup-making, contains a field’s worth of coriander and is, therefore, rendered inedible to me). I don’t even make excuses – executing a perfect ninja bomb, I’m back in my room and asleep by 8.30pm. On a Friday night.

I must be getting old.

Author: Ania Rokita