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Published: October 25th 2006
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So that's actually a lie, since there were no tigers or bears. And apparently the whole statement is a lie because you can't see them all on one continent. But what we did see was essentially the real life lion king.
Etosha is a big national game park in Namibia, so after we got picked up from our rural homestays Wednesday morning we headed off for our mini safari. Now when I pictured safari I definitely pictured off roading in a big open landrover. Instead we drove on gravel roads through the park in our combis. I guess in all fairness though we called it a "game drive" and we had no where near enough khaki on to warrant a real safari. In a lot of ways it's kind of like Yellowstone...except with lions and elephants and other fun African animals.
So our first day we were just driving through the park to make it to the place we'd be staying for the night. We were unbelievably excited to be there...so much so that our driver, Passat, had to institute a no talking rule so we wouldn't get kicked out of the park. Our first zebras were a big
Springbok
they taste pretty delicious too. we have all never craved as much meat as we did during the game drive. Odd? yes. event...but by the end you didn't even look twice when you saw a zebra because there are so many of them everywhere. And really, while they are beautiful, they are just fancy donkeys. We saw a lot of deer like animals on our first drive- dik diks, ostriches, springbok, oryx- and we saw a female lion right on the side of the road! I of course had my camera packed away in the trailer so have no documentation, but I'll eventually just steal people's pictures that were better anyways.
More exciting though was getting out of the combis after having sat in them for a good 10 sweaty hours. Our visions of sitting by the pool were somewhat shot when we saw that the pool looked more like a black lagoon because of the large amount of algae growths. But after a week wihtout, I was pretty satisfied with flushing toilets and a shower though. Amy and I were sharing a room with our professor, who just so happens to also be a pastor, Sarah. Which would appear to be really awkward- but she's awesome so it worked out really well.
Our first night was completed with a
braai and s'mores and then we walked down to a watering hole near our hotel. We were hoping to see lots of animals come to get water, but the most we saw was a bird, a lot of Germans and a ridiculous number of bugs.
The next morning we loaded back into our beloved vans for a day of game drive. We were all a little tired, and Passat told us because of the rain the night before our chances of seeing an elephant was less than 10 % since a lot of the animals wouldn't have to come out to find water. It started off a little slow, but the powerful combination of Passat's well trained eye and having Pastor Sarah with us paid off big time. Sarah announced that she was feeling lucky. We then saw a female lion with her cubs really near to the road and an elephant! I knew elephants were big, but this guy was huge! Sarah then announced that she would really like to see a giraffe up close, like in the middle of the road. We round the next corner and there one is. I love giraffes...by the end of the
day we'd seen a ton of them too, but I never really got tired of them. They are so goofy looking. Before lunch we also managed to see a male lion...which may I mention are the most worthless animals ever. They get all the credit, but the female lion does all the work, a rhino and all the old standbys. We were pretty satisfied, having seen most everything expected so we started our drive back to the hotel on the main road, not really expecting to see anything else. When talking about the luck we had Sarah mentioned that she wasn't going to push it by asking for a cheetah to cross the road or anything. Cheetahs are really rare and hard to spot...Passat has been to Etosha more times than he can count, but has never seen a cheetah there. And what do you know, next thing we see is a cheetah dart across the road. We all got to see it- but none of us were able to get a picture, which makes it that much more cool. We were pretty excited about that, and when prompted to ask for the baby elephant we wanted to see Sarah
again pulled the humble card and said that she thought asking for an elephant family would be pushing our luck. Literally no more than 5 minutes later we come across an entire elephant herd! There were 19 elephants, tons of baby elephants and we got to just sit there and watch them. It was a pretty lucky time to have the front seat of the combi...until I accidently bumped the radio on a full blast with my knee as us and all the other people were silently watching the elephants. I can see how safaris and game drives are addictive, because we were all so giddy after seeing all of those animals so close...and the irony of the predictions made it that much more fun, but I guess that's what happens when you travel with Pastor Sarah. She does have connections.
We had to try and contain our excitement and not gloat too much because the other van saw virtually nothing. We did a pretty bad job of it, but they did end up getting to see an elephant on the way out of the park the next morning, so we didn't feel too bad.
We had an
excellent buffet dinner that night where we got to try Oryx and Kudu. Neither lived up to the amazing Ostrich I had in Swakopmund, but the Kudu stew was pretty tasty.
We gave the watering hole a few more shots before we left and never saw anything. I'm pretty much convinced the animals were all out there hiding and got more entertainment out of watching us. We headed out of the park Friday morning and drove several hours as a group until we were dumped off on our own to embark on our fall break adventures!
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