It rained pretty hard on Wednesday night and continued into Thursday morning, so we woke up to a cooler, wetter game drive. Ephraim had fleece lined ponchos to keep up warm and they were sent from Heaven! Although hardly any animals were out because of the wind and rain we did manage to see a giraffe, some zebra, and a lot of fresh muddy animal tracks including: lion, gnu, impala, gecko, and hippo.
After the morning drive we packed up our things, ate brunch, settled with management, bought be a Cheetah Plains souvenir in the form of a baseball cap, and headed back out onto the treacherous dirt road, now muddy from all the heavy rains. We caravan-ed with Heinz and Elsbeth just past the townships, and then headed towards the Johannesburg airport while they headed to drive the Garden Route and continue Heinz birthday South Africa adventure.
As I said before, we stayed at the Cheetah Plains Private Game Reserve, Sabi Sand at Kruger National Park. I cannot say enough good things about this place, if you ever go on a South African safari I HIGHLY recommend Cheetah Plains! The staff was amazing! They catered to my crazy food allergies which was a huge blessing. Our guide, Ephraim, was the best ever, he was an expert tracker and was knowledgeable about all the animals, birds, and flora. We saw every animal on our list, including the Big 5: elephant, rhino, buffalo, leopard, and lion. It was such an amazing experience to see such beautiful animal out in their natural habitat; no fences, no one feeding them, pure wild. One night as we were leaving our hut to go to dinner we walked outside to an elephant not 30 feet away from us, just on the other side of the electric fence that was the lodge boundary!
We definitely had some rookie experiences. Such as our camera lens fogging up, which us being new to photography in general didn't exactly know how to handle! We ended up just letting it dry out before using our camera, luckily on Wednesday morning the fog on the lens cleared up just in time for the lions big debut!
It was also interesting to experience the different dialects of the natives in South Africa. The Republic of South Africa has 11 official languages! How crazy is that!? Luckily English was one of them, so communication wasn't an issue, but it was funny how different English there is! Instead of saying "okay", people say "ya-ya" and "cool" a lot. To "scheme" doesn't have the negative connotation it does here, it simply means "to plan", nothing menacing implied. They don't send "texts" they send an "SMS", and instead of saying "text me", we heard a lot of people saying "give me a tinkle"...which yeah, totally different meaning here huh? Diapers are "nappies", which I personally like. Oh, and stop lights? "Robots"...that one took some getting used to, and honestly I hardly could contain my laughter every time someone giving us directions would say "turn right at the second robot"; I just kept imagining R2-D2 standing on the corner! Another thing I rather liked was that instead of Zebra [zee-bruh] they used the pronunciation Zeb-ruh (I wish American English was as pretty as South African English).
We had the most amazing trip, and feel so blessed to be able to have gone, especially at this crazy time in our lives! I feel a new appreciation for God's creations, and a new respect for the wild and untamed.
This world that our Heavenly Father has created is so beautiful, and so perfect!
No comments :
Post a Comment