Irritable elephants and cheeky monkeys

Greetings from Durban, South Africa! It feels like it's been forever since the last post, but I guess I'm not as much of a slacker as I thought. Steve and I have spent the last couple of weeks on the Southern Africa portion of the guided tour (and have another week or so to go with this group.) As seems to be the unending story of my experience with internet in Africa, this computer has completely disabled file saving, photo uploading, etc, so if you would like to check out our route and the absolutely ridiculous looking "bus" we're traveling in, check out these links: http://www.nomadtours.co.za/south_african_explorer_c_3.html#mapsheader and http://www.nomadtours.co.za/our_vehicles.html

Maybe one day I'll actually find a computer that will let me load some of our photos (which I think we have thousands of already.) So in words, what exactly have we been up to in Africa? Our tour group started out as 8 people and two guides/drivers, then after a week we had 3 new people join. It's been a mixture of ages/nationalities, from a 21 year old Dutch girl to a 40+ year old Scotch guy and his mother, a couple of brazillians, a german girl, an english guy, a couple of Californians and us. As we found out on the first day, we were a VERY lucky group because we were so small- the bus has capacity for 26 people, so with 11 total we've had plenty of room to spread out in (although napping is a bit of a challenge considering how bumpy the roads are, but we keep getting told that they're just going to get worse in East Africa!)

We have been making our way across South Africa, spending a night or two in every town. We've done about half camping/ half staying in dorm rooms depending on the weather and how lazy we're feeling about putting up our tents. One of the highlights has been our guide/cook- he is a professionally trained chef so the dinners he's been cooking have been amazing- we've gotten to try a number of local dishes (and it all comes out of a tiny kitchen that's built into the side of our bus). Tonight is a going away dinner for 3 of the original group members, so our guide gets a night off cooking and we're heading to a great restaurant (according to some other groups we've run into) in Durban.

As far as activities, we have been VERY busy getting to see a lot of the local flora and fauna. We went to an ostrich farm where I got to hold a 3 day old baby ostrich- much cuter than the grown ups- and Steve got to ride on one. He held his own pretty well, and fortunately we have it all caught on video! I found out there are ostrich jockeys, similar to horse jockeys-that race, but that sport hasn't really made it to the States yet...... keeping my fingers crossed...

We also did our first visit to a game park- Addo. We drove through the park in our bus (named Freddy) and had an encounter with a very irritable old elephant. We didn't realize at the time he was not happy with us, we thought he was just walking up to the bus to take a look, but when someone accidentally dropped a camera it spooked the elephant and our driver kicked it into reverse at full speed, then our guide explained that the elephant had given us two "mock charge" signs and was ready to really charge at our bus hence the reverse to get out of his way. Crisis averted, and again it was all caught on video. We spent the night at the park and had a few run-ins with some very curious monkeys who were quite adept at stealing food off of tables of unsuspecting campers.

In a few days we head to the very well-known "Kruger National Park" where we'll hopefully see more of the "Big 5" including lions. :-)

I am literally down to 2 minutes on the computer, so this post has to end before the computer kicks me off. We are having a great time on the trip and are VERY glad we're doing it with a group. Hopefully I"ll be able to post again soon with some photos of Steve on the ostrich!

Cheers!

Anna