Day 14 & 15 London to Zulu Nyala

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Well , the time has finally come to prepare for Africa. We are reorganizing our luggage, preparing for airline travel again. Everyone is off doing some last minute sight seeing in London. After breakfast Mike & I decided to take advantage of free hook-up at the hotel, and try to publish Some journals. We managed to send off 7 days, but it took all of our time left in London to do it. I think the blogs are a wonderful thing, but find it cuts into some of our tourist time. We will continue to journal, but may not take the time to publish until we get home. We will see how it goes. We all caught a van to Heathrow at about 2:30. ( as that was when the van was available) Our flight was not until 7:05, so it was a long wait. The good news is that Heathrow was like being in a huge shopping mall. ( Restaurants, shopping, etc. ) The time went by fast, and we were off to Johannesburg . Eleven hours, and a one hour time change, we arrived at Joberg. A couple of hours later (and a nap or two) we were in Richards Bay. We piled into a van, and then a couple more hours later (and a couple more naps) we were at Zulu Nyala. We came through the gates, and on our way to the lodge passed some wild boar, Impala, and Nyala’s. We checked in, and had a quick lunch while we waited for our luggage. They had placed it on another van going to a different accommodation. As soon as we got our bags in our room they were putting us in Jeeps to go on safari. The Gaul’s, Thomas’s, McGinty’s and two gentlemen from Puyallup, made up our group, and our guide was Dan. The father son team from Puyallup were professional photographers, and artist’s. They did not know what they were doing riding with us. It’s really hard to keep our group quiet, and it does scare away the animals. Actually we all had a great time. We spent about 3 hours driving around the compound. Oh my word. About 200 pictures later I thought, and I’ve got 6 days of this We saw Nyalya, Impala, Wildebeest, a large herd of Giraffe( with a baby nursing ), Monkeys, Hippos, Alligators, and The only three elephants, in the park. Oh yes and we also saw a beautiful sunset while we were driving into it. Back at the lodge we had just enough time to get cleaned up and make it to dinner. Everyone else had arrived and we had our Longview corner of the dinning room. Dinning is a bit like a cruise. Everything is buffet. the food was delicious, and service is very good.. You have to pay for all of your drinks, but we have found everything to be quite reasonable, especially after just leaving London. After dinner we had local dancing and music for entertainment. Very cool. ( the dancing was actually a lot like the street dancing we saw in York, except the were wearing a bit more in York.)
I do believe, we are going to be very happy here, and we are both thrilled to stay in one spot for a while. I sure you have noticed we have rolled 3 days together in this blog. Actually it did seem like one continuous day, just napping on the go.
I'm sure you have figured out by now that Day 8 was the last published journal until we arrived home. I enjoyed keeping my journals, and I am also enjoying sending them out from the comfort of my home. I hope you enjoy them as well!

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