Advertisement
NOW I MISS TECHNOLOGY
I have to phone the Fraud people in Australia and because of time difference have to do it e-a-r-l-y, well before 0800 anyway. Because the only place I can get phone coverage is in the one spot in Reception I head up there at 0645, but it’s closed. I walk around for half an hour trying to get my phone to work, I must look like a complete technology city geek walking and looking at my phone waiting for any sign of life. Eventually get 2 bars, hallelujah! Get through the right department (should add here that I’m standing half way up the hill in the middle of the road), I kneel down to get information out of my bag and bang - disconnected, that half a metre obviously makes a lot of difference in mobile phone reception!
I’m at this moment hating the get away from technology thing that we thought was so quaint when we first arrived here…
Give up waiting for anyone in Reception to appear and drive out of the hotel grounds and further up the mountain. Finally get reception, finally get through and get half way through the whole
story again, and then it happens, put on hold and disconnected AGAIN. Finally get through, tell the whole sad sorry story again and am reassured that in 3-4 days everything will be fixed. So now we wait…
Phone Mum and Anna to tee up for Anna to bring us our new Credit Card when we see them in London in July, lifesavers!!!!! Was nice to have a chat, although brief and possibly not the best of reasons or circumstances, but still nice.
TIME TO CUDDLE ME SOME CHEETAH
After breakfast we head to Cango Wildlife Park. They’re involved in a Cheetah Protection and breeding program and you can have a cuddle and play with Cheetah and Tiger cubs if they have any at the time.
We were a little skeptical as to what the conditions were going to be like, considering it was in a very small outback town in South Africa and I’ve got to say we were completely in awe of what we saw.
The enclosures were amazing - you walk on a boardwalk high above the enclosures so you look straight down into them. Each enclosure is set out specifically for the
cat that’s in there, for example the tiger has a big pond to swim in, some enclosures have more sand than grass and vice-versa.
We were able to sit and play with 2 cheetah cubs that were 2 years old, 3 white tiger cubs that were 2 weeks older than the cheetah cubs (but soooo much bigger and heavier) and then 4 more cheetah cubs that were born in October 2009 so they were only 7 months old. It was such an amazing experience, they were all really playful and were allowed to do as they pleased, unlike in Thailand etc where they are on chains and HAVE to perform. These little guys were allowed to run off and play if they want or stay and be patted, although they were quite happy to stay with us, they were all purring LOUDLY and would just lay all over us, play and suck on our fingers, especially the tiger cubs.
There was also Meerkats, crocodiles (that you can go underwater in a cage and swim with, I didn’t and my excuse was I was already getting Tim’s man-flu and we can’t be sick when we get to Uganda or
we can’t go see the gorillas), wallaby’s (Aussie, Aussie, Aussie), a bird enclosure, reptile house an lemurs. All the enclosures were done so well, for such a small establishment it would give some of the bigger zoos a run for their money.
Came back to hotel after doing the town thing, changing money, buying Tim his daily dose of snacks for drive tomorrow and getting fuel (complete with full window clean). Had a look at and fed the Kudu, deer and springbok that live there. They also breed goats here, and have had about 30-40 babies born in the last 3 days. We watched while the workers tried to get all the goats and babies into a shed that they sleep in for the night, it can only be compared with trying to get 50 birds into a cage one at time without them flying back out everytime you open the door to put another in. They weren’t very obliging going all over the place, and the mum’s and babies don’t stay together - it was just too funny!
Had a last dinner at the restaurant with the deer down below, Chloe the dog stayed by our side
as we ate on the deck and then led the way back to our room and made herself at home on the rug!
Packed everything up ready for early departure tomorrow morning.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.062s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 10; qc: 32; dbt: 0.0282s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
linda
non-member comment
amazing
hi there how amazing are those cubs and how awesome do they doo it over there, bummer about your cards, but like you said all fixable. glad to here that Tim is able toget his choccie fix or is it bribery forthhe animals miss you lots ENJOY ENJOY ENJOY i am keeing a look out for you both on the morning news, as they are in South Africa at the moment for the football they say its very cold in the mornings ciao