Just a Few Quotes

• Me: “You’re not taking the gun this time?: Andreis: “Rain coming, don’t want gun get wet.”
• Andreis: “No problem, lion don’t do nothing USUALLY.”
• Hendrick: “Sleep! Elephants don’t do nothing!”
• All guides at least five times a day: “No problem, USUALLY.”
• Me: “We haven’t seen any rhinos, could we look for those today?” Andreis: “Just after we find these three lions I heard about.”
• Andreis: “We’ll find rhinos right after these six lions.”
• Andreis: “Lions, lions, lions, lions, I see lions everyday!”
• Breakfast at the Airport Grand Hotel: “Sir, are could we please get spoons for our cereal?” “Sorry, the guy with the key to the spoons isn’t here this morning.”
• “Splendid” and “Lovely” ALL of the time.

New Foods
• Crocodile fingers
• Kudu Biltong
• Impala pie
• Ostrich biltong
• Klipking (fish)


This final picture describes us perfectly!

St. Lucia (Adventure #9)

Carrie tells me it’s way past my turn to add a few words. We rented a car in Richard’s Bay and managed to find our way (only got lost once) to St. Lucia, our second World Heritage Site. Carrie is doing a great job with driving on the “correct” side of the road, which requires us to keep repeating, “Stay left, stay left.” Our log cabin is on the banks of the estuary and I’m excited to see even a few of the 450 bird species local to this area. Of course, we are seeing more hippos and crocs in the water. On our drive out to Cape Vidal, we were our own trackers through the wildlife reserve, and were doing pretty good until parts started falling off of the car. The funniest part was that we were inside of the game reserve and not supposed to be out of the car at all. We’ve learned some good lessons from our trackers, so just said, “No big problem, the engine’s still running, threw the parts in the trunk and kept driving.” They’re telling us, “No problem, we’ll bring another car.” We’re waiting….
The new car arrived 29 hours later! Good thing we made it back to our hotel and weren’t stranded somewhere.
We are now headed back to Johannesburg…our three extraordinary weeks sadly have to come to an end.

Pondoro Lodge (Adventure #8)

We went from tent camping to three days at a beautiful lodge. Our guides, Erick and Andreis were very good at their job, they just loved finding lions a little but too much!

You can also see the pictures of Batista the mongoose who became our new friend.

Our road trip back to Johannesburg took us through the Blyde River Canyon, third deepest canyon in the world. We almost made it back to Johannesburg when we both woke up to the car stopping on the freeway. Luckily they were very prompt in sending a cab for us and delivering us to our hotel. We said goodbye to our driver Mike and we only hope that he wasn’t on the side of the road for too long.

Tent Camping Dropouts…almost (Adventure #7)

Night One: We slept ok..



Night Two: After seeing so many big animals and being challenged by elephants on our game drives, before going to sleep we inquired about how low the fence was going around our camp. We learned that it really “do nothing, just make tourist feel better.” My mom sleeps with ear plugs. I consider this unsafe. About midnight I woke up to sounds RIGHT outside of our tent. I woke my mom up and she told me it was nothing. That is until she looked up out of the window of our dome tent and inches away saw elephant tusks…looked down out the window of our dome tent and counted elephant toes! We laid there shaking, not knowing what to do. The elephant was at least four times the size of our tent and stepping us wouldn’t even phase the big guy! We laid there as we heard the elephant munching and crunching on the tree right above us. After about 30 minutes we snuck out of our tent, barefoot, and briskly walked to the kitchen (the one indoor building at our camp) and made it safety! We sat awake in the kitchen and slept sitting up in there for over three hours before we were brave enough to return to our tent. Mom went out once earlier to see if the elephants had left, but I had to yell for her to come back in because there was a big snake on the patio, so we put off going back out there for quite awhile. This was all a very big deal to us, but in the morning we were told, as we were told many times, “No problem…usually.”
Jumbo (the elephant’s name) came back to visit us with all of his friends several times throughout our stay. To help herself calm down, Mom even drew this picture of him in the middle of the night.








Night Three: In the middle of night two while we were sitting in the kitchen we decided that we were going to be tent camp drop outs! We would head to the nice lodge a night early and actually get some sleep. But, of course, we toughed it out and are very glad that we did! We did change tents to one a little bit farther away from the miniature fence. Still didn’t sleep much that third night, but we were glad we stayed and when the elephants came back, we didn’t even sneak out of our tents to the safety of the kitchen.





Our game drives with Elton and Hendrick were amazing! They both loved their job and we so excited about the animals. Our most interesting drive was at night. We were heading back to camp we came across two male lions. They were just staking out spots in the road in front of us to lay down and then started roaring to dominate their territory. Their roars can be heard for many kilometers and shook the ground around us. We watched them for a few minutes from closer then we liked and then we let our guides know that we were ready to back up and go. They laughed and informed us that this was the only road back. We literally went around the first lion within a foot of him. He totally ignored us. Mom and I were basically on the floor of the open-sided Land Rover and Yoost said, ”Take photo, take photo.” I couldn’t even watch. Then, we had one lion in front of us and one lion behind, roaring in stereo! We had to go around the second one. It was right in the middle of the one lane dirt road. Terrifyingly beautiful!

It was really fun to watch our meals being cooked entirely over the fire and to eat with our guides, learning about their lives growing up in the bush.

Side trips included the Cheetah breading project and Moholoholo, a place that rehabilitates wildlife, educates homo sapiens and reintroduces endangered species into the wild.

On the Road to Kruger (Adventure #6)

Mike was our driver from Johannesburg to Balule, a private game reserve right outside on Kruger National Park. Per my mom’s request we stopped at the Sterkfontaine Caves, the Cradle of Humankind.. It is a national heritage sight where 3 million year old hominid fossils have been found. Sure gives some perspective to our life here on earth.
When we got near Balule we turned down a very bumpy dirt road. We traveled down it until the car could not make it any further. At that point, Mike turned us over to a Land Rover with Elton and Hendrick, our guides for the next three days and Jooste, from Holland, the one other guest at the camp. At arrival the little dome tents looked so cute. How exciting to be camping out! They didn’t look quite as cute once we realized that the electric fence around the camp was no more the three feet high. Still, at this point I had no fears of the animals…That was before the game drives had begun AND before we realized that several snakes would be joining us in our/their camp.

Chobe River (Adventure #5)

Today we drove to Botswana, where we’ll stay for two days. This is a picture of us at the point in the river where Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia meet. It’s the only place in the world where the borders of four countries touch.

These next pictures are of our boat ride up the Zambezi River. It was a beautiful evening! I noticed right away that our driver, Tom, was a lot like my driver, Jeremiah, back in Lagos. But, I really became skeptical when I realized that our tiny, rickety boat reminded me a lot of my car back in Lagos. We saw a lot of hippos and crocs, getting what felt like way too close to them and our engine kept having problems. On a couple occasions it flooded and it took Tom quite some time to get started again. It just didn’t seem to be clicking that constantly starting and stopping the engine was causing it to flood.
In these first pictures you’ll see the beautiful herd of elephants. We were so excited just to see one, but then the entire group came down to the water to drink while we just drifted closer and closer in our boat and watched, hoping that the engine would start when we needed it too. Beautiful.
As we kept going, Tom let us know that we had gone off of the main channel and needed to go down a small side area to get back on track. This once again brought back memories of what Jeremiah would do. So, my mom and I both look up the small channel. It is FILLED with hippos.…a hippo roadblock! Before we have a chance to say anything, Tom starts going full speed. With hippos in front, behind and on both sides mom and I just pray that the engine keeps going. But then it got worse. A mamma hippo with two babies decided that we got too close and started to come after us full speed. Luckily, the engine kept going and we sped on by. I had been excited to see hippos and crocodiles and hadn’t thought twice about seeing them in a tiny boat. Now that we were living our own combination of Fear Factor and a Disneyland ride, we’re wondering if we would be glad, to never see another one again. The rest of the boat ride was happily much less eventful.

Walking tour of Victoria Falls (Adventure #4)

Highest in the world? Nope. Widest in the world? Guess again! Most water tumbling down? Now you’ve got it? We are here at the end of the dry season this year. During the height of the rainy season it’s solid water all the way across!!!

Zambezi River (Adventure #3)

These pictures are from our evening boat tour on the Zambezi River. We went in an antique boat up the river a little ways from where it drops off into the falls. We saw lots of hippos, my favorite part of the trip. We also saw crocodiles and you can even see the picture of my mom eating crocodile toes.

Helicopter (Adventure #2)

Next up was my very first helicopter ride over one of the seven natural wonders of the world…Victoria Falls, where the mighty Zambezi River plunges into a gorge. Once again, I was a wimp about it but VERY glad that I went. It helps having a 59 year old crazy mom to make sure you see things. You can see from the pictures how beautiful the view was. I just don’t recommend thinking about safety and maintenance regulations while up in a helicopter in a foreign country. Dad, just so you know mom tried to talk me into bungee jumping off of the falls.