The following was written by Brad Sewell after arriving in South Africa for the Club's pre-season training camp.

Monday morning at the Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus South Africa and it’s 4.45 am - our efforts to prepare for the time zone difference in the days prior to leaving Melbourne can only do so much.

I managed five-and-a-half hours sleep Friday night, just two-and-a-half hours Saturday night to be at the airport by 4.30am, to depart for Johannesburg via Sydney.

As we took off from Sydney to Johannesburg, I began to make conversation with a South African Grandmother of five, who was seated next to me. She was from the outskirts of Sydney and was returning to South Africa to visit her her son and his family.

This was my first taste of South Africa.  

I can’t imagine being in South Africa at more significant time in history. On the Wednesday before leaving Melbourne, we were fortunate enough as a group to watch an advanced screening of the Nelson Mandela movie, A long walk to Freedom, which gave us an understanding of his impact on the country.

While this is a once in a lifetime trip, ultimately this is a training camp.

A performance camp designed to push out physical limits but more than that, our mental limits. How will we perform/react so far out side of our comfort zone?

As one of the experienced players and in a leadership position, time spent outside of our normal enviroment is arguably the best way of understanding our new players, both young and experienced.

It’s also intriguing to watch how players that have been in our system for a period of time and how they have developed. 

We will be training and staying at Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus, which is a 65-hectare training facility approximately two hours from Johannesburg.

It was hard to get an understanding of the surrounding enviroment as we arrived in darkness on Sunday night.  Yet after a restless sleep, we rose to see endless sporting grounds as far as the eye can see and it became easy to understand why the fitness staff had a glint in their eye when first speaking about the opportunity to train at such a venue, if only for three days.

It was at this venue the English soccer team prepared for their World Cup assault in 2010.

We are in good company.