Caddie's Role: My first introduction to wildlife on this trip to South Africa was a rather chilling speech by the artist who sculpted the bronze giraffes presented as gifts to the 12 invited players to the Sun City event a couple of weeks ago.

It is a tradition at the event that the players receive a piece of art representing the environment as an appreciation of their making the long trip south.

The artist made what most thought was a tenuous link between the long and loping but extremely elegant giraffe and a professional golfer.

On the one hand the golfer is quiet and graceful with a flowing swing, just like the movement of the giraffe.

But also there is almost a dark side to the golfer. When under pressure he will become aggressive.

Ditto the giraffe, which will "kick out its hind legs and crush the predator's skull causing its eyeballs to explode", according to the sculptor. Apparently the artist had witnessed the dark side of the graceful giraffe's nature.

As a caddie I have never witnessed eyeball explosions during a tight moment in a round, but I have been on the wrong end of some chilling glares that would make your eyeballs pop out if you didn't avert your gaze.

Having a spare week before the South African Open, my boss, Retief Goosen, invited me to join him at his house on a game reserve about two hours north of Johannesburg.

The trip from Sun City was quite an adventure for a driver who is used to negotiating normal, everyday roads with the odd signpost thrown in.

After a couple of hours of bouncing around on dirt tracks, which make your throat itchy and your skin gravelly - and that's with the windows shut - I happened upon a friendly farmer at yet another signless T-junction who knew which direction to point me in.

As I eased onto the tarmac road, it was the first time in many decades of renting cars that I actually felt like they had undercharged me.

If you want to get good value from your hired vehicle, get on a dirt road in South Africa and feel the suspension cringe as you fly through the air.

Retief met me at the entrance to the farm and I followed him to our lodgings. There is obviously a strict architectural code on the property whereby the buildings must have a traditional thatched roof with a designated pitch.

Many homes have a great mix of the traditional and the contemporary: its not all stuffed buffalo heads sticking out of the living-room walls.

My second introduction to the wild of the veld was the footprints of a sizeable animals about two steps from the front door. Now when you enter a game farm there is a high fence around the property in order to keep the animals in, but my excited mind began to run amok when I saw the hoofprints. My concerned look betrayed me: Retief informed me there was nothing in here that wanted to kill me apart from him - whenever I gave him a club that took him over the back of a green. But that wasn't going to happen this week as there was no golf.

Or maybe there would be. There is a championship golf course on the reserve, which is accessible to all the animals on this side of the fence. Given their freedom to roam, the greens needed to be roped off at night to stop them stomping all over the surprisingly good surface.

As I looked out over the clubhouse an ostrich pranced, a bit like a drunken old madam trying to move elegantly but failing miserably. When it got to the middle of the putting green it dropped a load almost dead centre. One of the hazards of golf on a game reserve.

I took off for a jog around the course later that evening to find a wildebeest charging in the savannah alongside the fairway. These creatures like to run; any I saw all week long were charging away into the distance with no apparent purpose.

After a couple of days on the reserve I didn't bother to strain my neck to look at yet another antelope. There were so many: impala, eland, waterbuck, bushbuck, nyala, kudu, wildebeest, hartebeest and zebra. They seemed like dogs in the street after a short while.

Of course after we went out with a ranger who drip-fed us endless facts about the birds and mammals of South Africa their presence was more meaningful. Our ranger for the five o'clock drive one morning turned out to be a former IT wizard from London who had sacrificed an hourly salary equivalent to what she now earned in a month.

The bush is so thick at this time of year, given that it had rained quite heavily in recent weeks, it is very difficult to see animals once they retreat a few steps from the road.

We came across a giraffe who took about four steps (10 metres for a giraffe) before disappearing from view. Given it's over five metres tall, its hard to imagine such a large creature disappearing so quickly.

We travelled to the other side of the reserve, where there were plenty of animals that would kill you if you got in their way. Hippos were there and we were fortunate enough to see three white rhinos. A male can weigh up to 1,500 kilos and reach speeds up to 40 kilometres an hour. They are massive and powerful mammals and all that from eating grass and the odd mouthful of soil to obtain minerals.

There is an important lesson to be learnt from game watching: the chances are you will not see a whole lot when you expect to but will chance upon something weird and fascinating when you least expect to.

We headed off the next day to a cheetah and wild-dog reserve in search of a bit of gore. Not only did we not find any hunting cheetah, we couldn't find the entrance to the reserve.

As we headed home we stumbled upon a small herd of giraffes. It was mid-afternoon and the giraffes are not normally active at this time of day. It was cool and the pair that we saw had more than browsing on their minds.

We pulled up, settled back and agreed we might as well take the time to see what giraffes get up to on a Thursday afternoon in December. Two hours later we were still there and the pair of mating giraffes were still at it. Sniffing, necking, shoving, ignoring, a bit of grazing - and finally the act itself, which to the untrained eye looked like a quick jab with a needle.

Given the gestation period of over 15 months and the two-year gap between pregnancies, I suppose we were extremely fortunate to witness the relatively rare act itself.

The artist had made the analogy between golfer and giraffe. After a week on a game reserve I began to see the connection. There is a lot of hanging around; you need to be patient; most of the day nothing really happens, but when you least expect it you might just see something to make your eyeballs pop.