Addo Elephant Park.

This weekend was amazing! Starting with Friday, I went to a rugby game at the World Cup Stadium at the north end of P.E. with Ex, who is a South African I met here last week and some of his friends. The game was really intense and I definitely like rugby more than football now. It is so much more intense and the game never stops like in football. Some people went out Friday night, but I chose not to because we had to be up pretty early the next morning for our Addo Elephant Park day trip. We starting off the morning by stopping at Daniels Cheetah Farm. This was by far the coolest thing we have done so far. We were able to walk up to a 4 year old cheetah and pet it. Everyone got tons of pictures and the cheetah purred the entire time we were there. She even would roll over and lick you, you could tell she was happy. At the cheetah farm, they breed the cheetahs to then release them into national parks or nature reserves to keep them far from poachers who have been responsible in the past of their scarcity. After the cheetah, we went into a pen with two baby lions, which were only a few months old. They couldn’t even make a sound yet, it was only a squeak. We got to touch and play with them for awhile. I still don’t have a camera, so I found myself playing with the one with a twig that she would swat at with her paw. We then hopped back into our van and drove to a lookout point that was located close to where we had our bush camp at. It overlook the entire valley and it was gorgeous. We took a bunch of pictures and learned all about the importance of the valley and how the river supplies the water needed for the citrus industry to maintain their high output of the fruits. Just afterwards, we headed to lunch at a bed and breakfast on the way to Addo. It was so delicious, and consisted of chicken and salad. Addo was just down the road so it didn’t take us long to get there. When we arrived, there was a 50 miler and 100 miler race going on in the elephant park! How cool to run a race surrounded by all those animals! We first had to make a group decision on if we should keep our sunset safari with light snacks, or go on a nighttime safari with a full fledged meal. Obviously we picked the one with a heavier meal. We then had some time to kill before our 8 o’clock game drive, so we drove around in our minibus through the park where we got to see a bunch of Kudu, which is similar to an antelope. We also saw a lot of bones just lying on the ground, which were obviously dead animals. They introduced lions and hyenas to the park around 2003 so that they could keep the Kudu population under control rather than just shooting them. If they controlled the population with a gun, then you would never see animals wandering around by vehicles because they would obviously be scared. And without the visitors to the park, they wouldn’t have enough money to maintain the huge area. Addo elephant park covers more land than even the Kruger Park in northern South Africa and boasts the “Big 7” instead of the usual “Big 5” the other game parks advertise. The 7 include: Lion, Elephant, Leopard, Rhino, Buffalo, Shark and Whale. The last two are only included in Addo because the park touches the sea at one end and offers shark dives and whale watches. Towards the end of our drive through the game park, we finally ran into some elephants, which was what we had all been waiting for. We took so many pictures and were so close. There must have been 8 or 10 total together and they even had a little baby with them. We sat and watched them walk for awhile, but had to be back to eat dinner so that we wouldn’t miss our night time game drive. We hurried through the park and almost ran straight into an elephant after a blind curve. Also, Kudu are the same as deer when in comes to running in front of cars seeing as we came very close to hitting one of them too. The night time safari was pretty cool, but we didn’t see as much as I thought we would. The one highlight though was definitely the hyenas. They traveled and packs and were just as scary and ugly as they are in the lion king. The were very sneaking and were almost like circling our truck. The drive was very cold and I didn’t bring a heavy enough jacket for the ride. On the way home, I am pretty sure the majority of the people fell asleep and I was exhausted by the time we got back that I was planning just to go straight to sleep, but my parents were online so I got a chance to talk to them for awhile. The next day we were planning on going to the market, but it was so nice that we just went to the beach instead. I fell asleep straight away when we got there. I don’t like the ocean very much here because it is so rough and I swear I have bruises from getting thrown around so much. The waves are sometime so huge that I just can’t handle it, but then there are times when there are no waves at all. It seems like when I am trying to get out past when the wave breaks, that is when they are huge and they just crash onto me. Ex came and I got to watch him surf for awhile, but then there was a surfing competition for younger kids. Some of these kids were amazing! I don’t really understand how a surfing competition works, but they just all caught waves for like a half hour and I guess they get points for how well they rode it. The weekend ended with skyping with my parents and baba. I would say this was a weekend for the books! Cheers!