Last year I won a media competition as part of the Nokia Come Closer campaign. I had to submit a photo and the person with the most interaction would have their photo recreated. The original prize consisted of a trip for me plus a reader. My photo was originally taken in Thailand but when I agreed to recreate the image locally (in South Africa), Nokia upped the prize and allowed me to take a friend along as well as a winner and their plus one. You’ll remember the competition we ran.

The final winner was Emma Garson who bought along her friend Caity Venniker. I chose to bring fellow Tech Girl Anne Dolinschek along. We all met at the airport as strangers but following two incredible days left George as great friends. There are no words to describe how much fun our girls weekend turned into… so much so that we forgot to be tech savvy and tweet about it (or we did, but not as much as we should have).

The most important bit – we found a tiger! A bit bigger and a bit more white than the original but I think Nokia did a pretty good job at recreating the original:

All the animals we got to interact with stay at Cango Wildlife Ranch where the animals are used in important breeding preservation programmes. When they are fully grown they are not thrown out or sold to hunters but rather take their place in the breeding programmes. All the animals we saw were extremely well taken care of and the guides were extremely well educated and had the animals best interests at heart at all time.

Nokia arranged an incredible trip and I could think of no better way to give you a glimpse into our tiger searching then prepping this little video: Nokia Project Come Closer to tigers (this video and all photos were taken with the Nokia 1520 – what an INCREDIBLE camera and the battery never let us down):