Hakuna Matata – hers
It means no worries, for the rest of your days. And for eight glorious days, we lived these words of The Lion King himself.
You have already seen quite a few of our photos and heard a number of our side stories while on our trip. In summary, here are the things I absolutely loved about our experience:
1. We experienced an African baby boom – baby elephants, baby zebras, baby giraffes, baby impalas, baby baboons, baby rhinos, baby warthogs, baby lions – most of whom we saw drinking milk from their mamas.
2. We watched and chased as a leopard attempted an impala kill. As I said in an earlier post – hands down the most exhilarating experience I have ever had.
3. We sat absolutely still in our vehicle to convince a perfectly lined up herd of nine hissing, glaring, ready to stampede elephants that we weren’t there to harm them.
4. We saw a giraffe carcass. The stories differed. Some say this old guy likely died in a giraffe fight about five days before we arrived, others said it tripped and fell during a lion attack. Either way, just hearing about and watching the way animals eat it in food chain order, was remarkable.
5. We got to meet other families and hear about their safari sightings and their lives in the places they live. The boy and girl made fast friends with three children from Windsor, a town just outside London.
6. We got to know our amazing guide, Michael, and hear about his experiences as a ranger in the bush. He taught us so much about the ecology of the area and about the animals themselves.
7. Barry and I did not fight while he navigated driving on the opposite side of the road in a manual car, on hilly roads. Nor did we fight when we realized on our last day in Cape Town that I had unplugged our room’s router (on the first day there) to blow dry my hair and that was the reason our room had such poor Wi-Fi signal. Oops.
The people of South Africa are amazingly gracious. We heard so many stories. The country is full of hope and of communities focused on making the world a better place. I have dubbed this vacation “the trip of a lifetime”…and it was. The joy we felt, and the joy we saw in the eyes of the boy and girl, at each experience was like no other.
As we prepare to move our lives back to the USA, I am overwhelmed with the gift we have been given the past two years to experience new parts of the world as a family.
Baie Dankie, South Africa. (Arfikaans for thank you very much…pronounced buy a donkey).