Cheetah Park, Namibia

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The cheetah park is basically an enclosure where some german family grows cheetahs.. it is pretty cool to see cheetahs walking freely in the owner's house like house cats.. you can go up to them and pat them and touch them.. sometimes.. they would come up to you to lick you.. maybe tasting to see if you need some more seasonings before you are worthy for them to bite into you.. the cheetahs at the home gets aggrevated at times.. and the owner had to calm them down before we can approach them again..

After that it's back to the campsite bar.. where you wait till evening time to go out on the truck to feed the cheeetahs in the 'sanctuary'... so until then, you have nothing to do, so you buy some beer from them.. excellent sales strategy.. coop tourists up in the bar and let them have nothing to do for an hour..

Feeding time comes, and you jump on the back of the truck.. and we drive into the cheetah sanctuaries... i think the cheetahs are all trained... cos once the trucks went through the gates.. cheetahs from the 'wild' started appearing from all directions.. they must know that at that particular time of each day, some trucks will drive through and hand free meat out to them.. it is still pretty interesting to watch 15 cheetahs following your truck as you drive slowly to the feeding grounds...

Once we arrived at the feeding grounds.. the owners started throwing huge chunks of donkey meat to the sides of the truck one by one.. and you can watch as the cheetahs fight and race to where each chunk of meat lands.. once a cheetah gets a chunk of meat, it will run off to enjoy its meat.. leaving the rest to fight for the remainder of the meat.. there's this poor cheetah who's blind in one eye.. and can never win during the fighting for the meats.. and the other cheetahs all bullied and intimidated him till he just sat there and yelped like a poor little kitten until everyone else had their chunk of meat...

After the feeding, you are driven back to the campsite, and there's this enclosure where they keep young cheetahs.. and they feed them as well.. and the tourists snapped their cameras away...

All in all.. a pretty cool, if not unreal, experience to see so many cheetahs appearing in the bushes at the same time... quite touristy.. but the cheetahs are such beautiful animals that you sort of forgive the touristy part.. some of us debated on whether such 'parks' or 'sanctuaries' are good.. well.. i dunno the answer... but i'd rather see cheetahs in the wild than to see them in sanctuaries such as these...

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