3.30-09

What a weekend! I’ll tell you, if you’re ever passing through South Africa and you get a chance to go to Imfolozi, fricken do it! Imfolozi is a 200,000 acre game reserve, quite possibly the coolest place I’ve ever been, mostly because it’s home to so many amazing animals I can’t even wrap my mind around it. Speaking of which, I still look back on pictures of this last weekend and can’t believe I encountered what I did. Let’s see, I saw elephants, lions, warthogs, impala (and different forms of antelope), rhinos (including black rhinos, one of Africa’s rarest animals), giraffes, water buffalos, wildebeest, hyena, zebra, crocodile, hippos, vultures, different birds of prey, baboons, other monkeys, and more I probably forgot. We were blessed to see what we did, it’s not something everyone gets to do. You roll the dice on these safari rides and hope you get to see what you do. So, for instance, one of the four cars we had had a leopard run in front of their car while the other three didn’t. It’s all up in the air.
It was so cool how things worked. Our camp was about an hour into the game reserve…literally in the middle of nowhere. It was wide open, meaning any game that comes by is welcome to walk through, including elephants which I’ll get to later. We stayed in tents, we showered with limited water, we cooked on a fire, it was so freakin’ cool. Wake up was at 5, in the cars at 5:30, through the reserve for about 3 hours, back for breakfast, out again till probably 2ish, lunch, back into the cars till about 6, and in for the night. We rode so much, but there was not a dull minute.
So, I’ll tell you the 2 coolest stories of the weekend, both concerning elephants, my new 2nd favorite, nearly tied for 1st, animal. Giraffe is still 1st if you were wondering. OK, first story. There’s this look out point on the reserve and it looks over a body of water, so seeing as how it was hotter than the depths of Hell itself, many animals are drawn to the water. Saturday afternoon we go to the spot and find a herd of somewhere around 100 elephant crossing, and they’re not just crossing, they’re also clearing out the six or so lions that are camped on the other side. It was awesome. In the next half hour, some 200 elephants crossed the water. People who had been doing safari’s for decades were saying they’d never seen herds of elephants this big…it was amazing!
Alright, the coolest story, no question. Here we go. You ready? I don’t think you’re ready. If I keep building this up you’ll probably be disappointed, here I go. Hey do me a favor and open up iTunes and start playing chariots of fire, or bittersweet symphony, or the instrumental of Coldplay’s Fix You or something. Ok, so Saturday night a group of 7 of us decided to stay up and “watch the stars.” To me that means hang out so I was game. Keep in mind, that most of the dangerous animals in the reserve are nocturnal. So about a half hour in I start hearing branches break in trees that looked about 50 yards away but the next morning we learned they were actually about 25 yards. So in time we learn that a. I’m not insane and there are actually branches breaking, and b. they are from a huge elephant who’s destroying this tree while he’s eating away. So, we watch our new found friend, and me and Dave take several trips to get a closer look. Again, at the time we thought we were some 30 yards away and had a huge tree between us and the elephant, when in reality we were no more than 20 yards and had the weeniest tree on earth between us. Eventually the elephant goes away, we all continue our talk, and head back to the tents around 11:30. On our way back I remembered that we’re supposed to scan the area with our flashlights so make sure we don’t get eaten or something like that. So I scan and what would you know but our new friend is now right in front of us in the middle of our tents. We slowly backed up and startled him enough that he ran almost our of the camp, but stopped right next to the guys tent to munch some more. In time, the seven of us are on our porch, 10 yards from this huge animal, staring at it’s feet and trunk cause that’s about all we can see. However, within 3 minutes, we did something to make it mad and it came around front rather upset with us. Dave, being the man he is, ordered the girls to get in our tent for protection, which none did of course, and we presumed to stare down this riled elephant as his trunk sniffed us from 10 feet away. Eventually he left, but while he stared, it made for one of the coolest, realest experiences of my life. I still can’t believe it actually happened.
Anyways, my weekend was amazing. I’m super tired still, so I gotta hit the sack. Here’s some pics. I’ll blog again in the next few days and get you some pics from my service site, Walk In the Light. Later!