Lions, and elephants, and zebras oh my!

5 February 2010

It’s 10:30pm here and I just got back from thee most incredible day.  I’m choosing to blog right away so I can remember the important details!  We got up early to hop on a bus with Bradley (the same guy who gave us our city tour) to go to Addo game park.  At Addo we were hoping to see some elephants, and well that didn’t happen.  Instead we saw about 155 elephants at one watering hole.  Yes I said 155!!! Our tour guide said the most he had seen before was just over 100 and that was in 1988.  Wow!  It was just so hot today (110) and the country is experiencing such a drought that many of the elephant families were getting water due to the heat.  I’m afraid my pictures won’t do it justice but it was so incredible to see those huge animals get in and out of the water and communicate with one another.  My dad would have been going crazy, I can’t wait for him to get here to see all these animals!!!

On our way to the watering hole we saw other animals like Kudu, plus the landscape was just so beautiful.  After seeing the elephants we stopped at a park in Addo for a wonderful lunch Bradley made.  Our group has decided this man knows everything and can do everything.  He has so many good stories to tell about South Africa and knows the good and bad about the country.

Then it was off to Scotia, another game park to see more animals. On the drive there we saw ostrich and zebras.  Zebras here are pronounced like this: the zeb is like deb but with a z!  It sounds so funny but I love it.  Here we broke into groups of 10 and went in a truck that was exactly what I would envision riding in on a safari in Africa!  We set out with our tour guide Nick to find more animals.  I was maybe 15ft max away from 2 rhinos today, 7 lions, and 4 or 5 giraffes.  I also saw a hippo, crocodiles, more zebra and kudu, antelopes, springboks, warthogs, and wildebeest, and I might even be forgetting some things.  It was insane and so surreal.  Our guide was awesome and let us out of the safari truck so we could get close to the animals, the other guides didn’t allow people to do that the way ours did!

Then we had dinner in the middle of this park in a beautiful little closed in area where during dinner we could hear the lions roaring.  Dinner was so great and I had lamb, chicken, and beef among other yummy things.  After dinner it was time to hop back into our safari trucks to see if the lions were doing any hunting since it was dark.  Unfortunately they were full so they were pretty lazy but seeing a huge male lion not even 10ft away under an amazingly star covered sky was better than anything I can imagine.  It’s hard to find words to describe all the beauty I saw today.

Overall despite all of the amazing animals I saw today I think I may have been most struck by the stars.  The stars were so beautiful and unlike anything I’d ever seen before.  Life really felt so unreal.  I didn’t even try to capture the sky with a picture because I knew it would be impossible and that in that moment the right thing to do was to embrace the beauty of my surroundings.  It may sound silly but a popular song I’ve heard here popped into my head, the classic: “he’s got the whole world in his hands…”  The kids here know that song well and as simple and pretty of a song as it is it really hit me while I was looking at the huge, huge sky with all of the stars.  God has made it all, everything in this world, and it is so much bigger than I will ever know and no matter where I am he’s still holding on to me and in my midst.  Wow.  It’s all so much to take in but I do know one thing, I’m incredibly blessed.  I’ve never heard the phrases “is this real life?” and “I’m sorry, what?” in regards to everything being beyond what we could even comprehend among my group today.

Long story short today was phenomenal!  I got so many good pictures I can’t wait to share them.  It was a wonderful day and I really felt like I was in Africa!  Tomorrow I will most likely spend the day at the beach as long as the hot African sun didn’t burn me too much today!  Thanks for keeping track of me and letting me spill my excitement! 

All my love,

Megan

And actually today just keeps getting better! I got my first piece of mail at Langerry, from my wonderful Grammy of course!  I decided the only thing that could make this day better would be sitting down with Grammy to show her all my pictures because I’m ready to talk for hours and she is one person I know would put up with it and love every minute!