Well, Well, Well.
[Insert apology for blatantly ignoring commitment to blog more often, as it's now June]
I'm currently sitting in an I-cafe in St. Lucia, a beautiful little beach/estuary town on the northeastern coast of RSA. Courtney and I have been here since Sunday afternoon, actually feeling like we are on vacation. On vacation in a ghost town, that is, since we estimate that there are about seventeen people in the whole place right now. Plus Glen and Glen, some very hilarious but fairly prejudiced 65-year old South Africans who forced wine down our throats and offered to impart some of their RSA 'wisdom'. I'll save that rant for another day when I return.
Before all of this happened, though, my 'companion' and I went on some other elephantine adventures, including a Safari and a very chilled-out trip to the KINGDOM OF SWAZILAND. Both were raucous good times, but obviously very different, so:
KRUGER PARK SAFARI:
We awoke last Saturday morning (May 23) at 4:30am in the grimy but live-in-able Backpackers Ritz in Jo'burg and loaded into van with a bunch of other excited animal lovers. Joanna, one of the girls from our research course, spent the entire night and morning sick as a dog, poor girl. Still, Courtney, Nipuni and I were in good chatty form and met some entertaining Scots (Colin and Ewan), and we all squealed with excitement together at the idea of "ANIMALS." We couldn't be bothered to think of anything else, even when a huge rock smashed the back window and we were forced to drive in fear of glass shard wounds for an hour until we found a huge plastic poster to cover the break.
Our first stop was near the town of Nelspuit, where we went to the Hoedspruit cheetah & endangered species rehabilitation centre. No sign of Lindsay Lohan. Before entering the reserve area, we watched a video documenting the history of the centre, which essentially followed a formula for the story of a dozen animals in the centre as follows:
"Lenny the Tiger was rescued from a circus where he was being abused"
audience: "aww"
"We brought him up, fed him meat, taught him to fend for himself a bit, and then reintroduced him into the wild"
audience: "Aww"
"It failed. And now he's stuck here"
Audience "..."
Honestly, though, the work they do is amazing, and we got to get extremely close to some animals. I'll post photos later.
We spent the night in a beautiful lodge called Timbavati (named after a famous John Timbavati, who had rescued some animals in his past as well). We had a delicious braii, danced awkwardly with the locals (analyzing our role at every turn), and tried really hard to get to a shebeen (local brewery) party down the road. It failed.
The next morning was a bright and early departure as well, as we headed off into the enormous Kruger park on a quest to see the big five. Or some Zebra ("Zehh-brah").
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Well, looks like I am currently out of time. We're off to Durban in thirty minutes, but I am hoping to get up to speed soon so you can actually hear about things as they happen. Three more exciting weeks...
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