This will be my last blog post about the trip! First of all, I just got home. It's 8:18 in the morning but it feels like its 2 in the afternoon to me, plus i didn't sleep much on the plane so i'm very tired! But I have to stay up until tonight!
Wednesday night (after i wrote the last post) we ate outside. There were heaters and blankets but it was still very cold, probably about 30 or 40 degrees. I'm blanking out on what we ate, but I know it was amazing. At the beginning of our dinner JR came out and told us some stuff about the stars. I had no idea that you see different stars in the Northern and Southern hemispheres! So it was a very cool experience! He had a super laser that literally could point directly to a star- he said it had the capability to blind a pilot so you had to have a license. After dinner we went back to our rooms and I took a hot shower which felt amazing after a day of being in the cold! Then it was bedtime.
On Thursday we had the same routine and woke up early for a safari. We went on 5 different trips so i'm having trouble remembering what we saw on this one, but that day we saw 2 female lions with 4 or 5 cubs! They are very relaxed animals and try to save their energy for hunting- so we got really close! This was so amazing! It's astonishing to me how much animals parallel humans- the cubs were so playful like kids and we couldn't stop the whole time we were at Jamala making little conversations between the animals based on their behavior.
We also saw a leopard the day before which somehow I forgot to write about! It was literally in the open in a clearing- Lucky said this was extremely rare for a leopard as they are usually hidden in the bush. He said he had never seen anything like it! We got extremely close to it as well.
That day we also got to see 4 cheetahs! These only sometimes are in the area they venture to, so it was a rarity and these beautiful creatures were also very relaxed, allowing us to come up about 10 feet from them! We have some amazing pictures! We also got pretty close to some elephants that night, which was great. They are so fun to watch drinking from a watering hole and I could have done it for hours!
That night we had beef fillets and sweet potatoes and steamed vegetables, followed by a delicious dessert! The food was so good there.
On the morning safaris we would stop for a snack and coffee and then in the afternoon for cocktails around sunset time. It's going to be weird to just not be able to get an alcoholic drink whenever I want anymore- and I am going to miss Amarula! There is a tree with fruits called the marula and mixed with cream it's an amazing drink that you can have plain or in hot chocolate or coffee. It tastes kind of like butterscotch! We brought some home but it's doubtful my parents will let me enjoy it :P
Friday morning we decided to sleep in and not go on a safari because we had literally seen every single animal, and the more common ones on many occasions! They provided a "safari checklist" which i'll post a picture of in my album on Facebook. We saw literally everything you would want to see!
OH! I figured out the Big 5 which I couldn't remember earlier- they're rhino, elephant, leopard, buffalo, and lion.
On Friday after breakfast we said goodbye to everyone (which was very sad) and then drove to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Honestly, this wasn't very much fun for me as I had already learned much of the info in my Colonial African History class, and one time is one too many for me to learn history! It's just not my thing.
We then went to the airport and had our 16 hour flight back to Atlanta, which actually felt way shorter than before. I watched a few movies and slept a little bit, but definitely not enough.
I'm about to post pictures and hopefully do laundry and other things to keep me occupied all day. I might have to make a Starbucks run to keep me awake :)
Thanks for reading guys, hope you enjoyed!
-Anna
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