Time: 5:00 pm
Days abroad: 83
(Post #5 (and final) of vac trip)
I know, I know…I fell off the wagon here with my blog story…I’m sorry, I had a paper due. Then it was Friday, then it was Saturday…anyway…I am going to finish it off now! Yay!
If it is any consolation, this will probably be the most boring story part but! The most exciting pictures!
Friday, April 1, 2011
Up with the sun…for the final time. Bella, Martin (the Swedish cousins), and myself were signed up for a game drive and our truck departed at 6:45am…the first and, I hope, the last time in my life that I have missed continental breakfast because I was TOO EARLY. Our game drive was through Masi-Oa-Tunya National Park which is the smallest national park in Zambia and also contains Victoria Falls…this is why it is called Masi-Oa-Tunya because that means the smoke that thunders (talking about the falls). Our drive was incredible!
Our driver started off by saying “I can’t promise anything except grass and springbok…but we will see”. So I am thinking oh great, we’re going to see nothing….boy was I wrong. We saw springbok right off the bat…and impala…but these aren’t exciting so I didn’t include pictures. We saw about a million warthogs (which are adorable) and elephants and hippos…but you’ve already seen pictures of them…
We heard the infamous Cape Turtle Dove (remember, “Bot-swa-na, Bot-swa-na…”?) only in Zambia they say “work har-der, work har-der” in the morning and in the afternoon they say “drink la-ger drink la-ger”…I think this is the case because there aren’t enough syllables in Zambia…I hear in Zimbabwe they say “Zim-bab-we, Zim-bab-we” haha.
Mamas and babies and daddy giraffes…there were so many. Our guide told us that that is what the park is most known for is their large giraffe population. He also told us that the Hindi word for giraffe translates to “walking majestic” and the Greek call them “the camel with leopard's spots”…just some interesting tid-bits for you :)
I know they aren’t beautiful…but, once again, I promised my grandfathers big game pictures…plus they are one of the big 5.
Finally! I had been hoping to see some close enough to get a decent picture.
And we were all DYING to see a rhino. Our guide told us that the park only had 7 rhinos and that they were all white rhinos. White rhinos and black rhinos are actually both grey-ish-brown…they are named that way because of a total misunderstanding. When the Dutch arrived they thought the natives were calling the rhino white but they were really talking about his upper lip. White rhinos have a square upper lip and black rhinos have a pointy one…so, the silly silly colonizers misunderstood and called the one the white rhino and, in order to differentiate, they called the other one black.
Anyway, our guide asked us if we would like to see one of the rhinos and we all eagerly said yes…well, all the rhinos in the park have 24 hour guards because of poacher…locate the guards and you locate the rhinos…
These guys are a couple of the guards. The one with the hat is probably the scariest person I have met in Africa thus far…he was completely straight faced and he had that GIANT gun. We hopped off the truck and he said “single file. Watch for snakes” and set off through the bush. We all half ran half tripped after him through the underbrush…at one point we all heard something running and he brought his gun down into shooting position and I actually thought I might die…but it was just a buffalo we had startled. We tromped and tromped and finally came to our rhino! A mama and a cute little baby:
After we looked for a while they took us back to the jeep and, of course, expected to be “appreciated” for their efforts in showing us the rhinos…quite a nice little racket they are running in the bushes…I’m sure it is perfectly legal.
After our game drive, we got back to the hotel about 10:30 and ate breakfast in the restaurant. We hung out until about 2:30 when Bella, Aman, and I were scheduled to go on a lion encounter!
We drove back to the same park to a reserve where they take baby lions from mothers that are in captivity and train them how to hunt for themselves and they are eventually re-released into the wild. The lions that tourists interact with are in step 2 of the 4-step program…they are young (the 2 we walked with were 6 month old sisters). They go on walks twice a day and if they see game and start to pursue it nobody stops them…though they are also fed in their enclosure at night. The 2 lions we were with are about to move to step 3 where they are placed on a 5,000 acre reserve and have to hunt for themselves. They will be tagged for tracking purposes but wont have any human interaction…they will be monitored from afar. After they have shown that they can adequately feed themselves then they are taken into another, larger reserve where they can integrate into one of the prides there. Their offspring will never have human interaction so they will truly be wild animals again.
I LOVED the lion experience; it was so much fun…so I included 4 pictures from it:
Yes, this is me...PETTING a lion. 
I can’t even tell you how many pictures I have of this day…it was a great day. I definitely want to go back to Livingstone. There is so much to do, it is a vacation on its own…it’s like the ultimate adventure vacation destination… Saturday, April 2, 2011
Going home day…
We got up and had our last breakfast as a group at 8:30 at the truck. We said our goodbyes to everyone because several people were leaving for activities (most people had an extra day or two or week in Livingstone). Then we all went up to the bar to drink Coke and wait for our taxis to the airport. We got to the airport FAR to early (2 hours before our flight) and there was nothing to do…Livingstone international airport is about as exciting as Windhoek…and Maun. I bought some peanut m and ms and took a little nap (by this point, my malaria pills were wreaking havoc on my stomach and esophagus). We flew to Jo’burg where we went through customs…got completely lost looking for our domestic ticket counter and finally found our gate. From there we flew to Cape Town and called a cab to get home. We finally got back to home sweet Highstead a few shades darker, a few dollars poorer, and a few bites itchier…from the vacation of a lifetime.
That’s it. I hope you guys enjoyed this little mini series…I have millions more pictures that I will definitely upload to facebook in June when I return to the land of unlimited internet…
I'll post again later this week...I went to an eco-village today...it was really cool! But that's a story for another time...I need to go make some supper
Love
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