Africa Safari

Africa

I'm very glad that I'm not a giraffe! If you click on the giraffe above though, you'll see the coolest 10% of the pictures we took while we were in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia.

So, Bruced and I went to Africa on an eight day photo safari. It was amazing! He signed us up for it a year ago, and it's not something that I would ever have chosen to do, but I figured since he wanted to go, I'd be a good sport about it and go with him. Then, just two weeks before we were supposed to go, we had THREE new grandbabies born, and it was just about more than I could do to leave them! Almost reluctantly, I got on the plane with him. It did not begin well. First of all, our flight out of Philly was delayed by over an hour. So when we landed in Atlanta we had to go running through the airport and were the last ones on the 15 hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa. They had given away our assigned seats, so we got to sit in the middle. Oh goody. Of course, when we arrived, we found that our luggage had not made the flight. Big surprise there. We checked into the hotel, and when I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, the toilet did not work, so we changed rooms at 4:00 a.m. At that point, I was pretty sure that I just wanted to be back home. At least at home, if I was up at 4:00 a.m., it would mean that I was holding a sweet little newborn! But that was the worst of it. Almost. When my luggage finally caught up to me, the next airline we flew on lost it again. So by Friday evening, after having left my house on Monday at noon, I had brushed my hair and changed my underwear ONCE!

The rest of the trip was FABULOUS!! I'm serious. Certainly worth the price of admission and I cannot wait to go back and do it again and take my kids this time! We rode around in open Land Cruiser Jeeps and saw elephants, leopards, hyenas, zebras, impala, crocodiles, all kinds of antelope, beautiful birds, baboons, monkeys, warthogs, mongoose, huge termite mounds, kudzu, giraffe, buffalo, hippos, rhinoceroses and lots of other wildlife. We visited a giraffe grave yard where we were amazed by the sheer size of the bones! Our jeep got stuck twice, and we had one flat tire. We drove through rivers and canoed through reeds so thick it looked like we were paddling through a wheat field. We saw beautiful sunsets every night. We were dwarfed by the giant baobab trees. We were awed by Victoria Falls. We made some good friends, enjoyed the African people and their culture, took about a thousand pictures, listened to hippos calling on some nights while we slept, and listened to the elephants grazing right outside our tents on other nights. We watched a hyena hang out on the edge of the deck while we were eating dinner, I think he was waiting for left overs. We watched herds of elephant graze and take mud baths on the edge of the Chobe River. We accidentally got too close to two different baby elephants and both of their mothers let us know that it was NOT acceptable! We were charged by a leopard who'd gotten the baboon he had been eating stolen from him by a hyena earlier that morning, and a bunch of tourists in a jeep staring at him just got on his last nerve! While we were watching another leopard eating the antelope he'd taken down, Bruce happened to look behind us and see a hyena creeping up for the leftovers not more than five feet behind the jeep.!We loved the landscape, enjoyed the people, and learned so much! I can now proudly identify many kinds of dung, and even tell you the difference between female giraffe dung and male giraffe dung, show you how to make a fire out of rabbit dung, and help you get your jeep out when its stuck in the sand, using elephant dung. Certainly more than I ever wanted to know about dung!

We survived the 16 hour flight home, and the plane didn't even crash, though it was seriously over weight from the extra carry on bags I brought home filled with the results of a five hour layover in the Johannesburg airport. I was wrong. Bruce was right. An African Safari was a fabulous idea.

He was wrong. I was right. They were not water buffalo. They were cape buffalo. AND he does like the really cool carved walking stick that I bought despite his whining and complaining in Zambia when I bought it.