There
are certain things I thought I would never get to do in life ...
...
and one of those things including finding myself living a scene from The Lion
King - exploring the savanna, observing animals in their natural habitat,
gazing stars while camping in the safari, etc. I would have to say it was one
of the most unreal and unbelievable thing I have ever experienced, despite all
the crazy things that I have gone through while travelling. Plus, there were
all these animals … Actually, I need to stop getting too excited and jump ahead
of myself. Let's start from the beginning.
Admist
the ever-changing and unpredictable semi-nice weather of Cape Town winter and
the fact that it is only September, the idea of spring break and a getaway was
extremely enticing. After pulling my hair and banging my head on the table for
two weeks straight, I had finally managed to decently finish a ridiculous
number of essays and papers. Again, for a biology major, 4 essays x 8 pages
each was just a little bit too much. After turning the last one (and the
most miserable one) in at 10am on Monday morning, I declared myself the status
of "on vacation", regardless of the fact that the official break did
not start until Friday and that all my friends wanted to kill me as they were
still stressed out about their assignments.
 |
| Didn't turn out as pretty as I wanted, sad. Photo taken by Susan |
Time
passed by painfully slowly as I awaited the day of the trip. But you know,
finally, Friday arrived. It had to. In order to cheer up the super exhausted
and stressed out Spencer after her exam, I made bacon toasted egg cups, which
apparently also helped lighten up Susan's night. After stomaching lots of
delicious food and a bottle of rose wine, we all decided that watching The Lion King before the night of the real safari was a must. So we settled down on
the couch, set up the huge projector screen, ordered ice creams from McDonalds,
chugged wine and had the time of our lives. It only felt like we were on break
then, and the idea that what I was watching on the screen would be what I got
to see a few day later brought me a ridiculous amount of excitement. Spencer
and I started watching Tangled after that, attempted to stay up all night since
we had to wake up at 4 in the morning to catch our flight. Obviously, we fell
asleep half-way through.
Early
sunshine Saturday morning, as much of a morning person I am, it was way too
early to open the door to an extremely
cheerful Eddie, who demanded a hug from all of us (a "squeeze"
as he called it) and went on about everything we needed to do before we left. I
was still slowly finishing my routine and waking up my brain, I swore I wanted
to punch the poor guy. Thanks goodness, my crankiness level was under control.
Sweet guy though, just too much sugar too early in the morning. To make it even
worse, the 20 minute ride to the airport was a torture of very unsuitable
choice of music, blasted at full volume. Elton John at 5am? I don't think so.
It
was the first time I flew with a group of friends so I actually had butterflies
in my stomach. It was like an overnight school field trip that I never got to
go throughout my entire school life (my parents are strict and no overnight
trip with friends were kind of a family rule). After checking in our luggage,
we all headed to a restaurant at the airport for breakfast. Nothing fancy -
just sunny side-up eggs, toasts, potatoes and mushroom (for the vegetarian me)
but I had a fabulous time enjoying having a leisure breakfast and great
conversations with friends. I have always hated flying by myself and spending
all the time at the airport alone. Thus, for me, this was quite a precious
moment.
After
a two hour flight and a four hour bus drive, which all of us kind of slept
through effortlessly, we reached the first destination of our trip - the
Sudwala Caves. Hold on, before I get to
the caves, I need to talk about the flight. One of our flight attendants
appeared to have a [ridiculously] lot of sense of humor. While she was giving
us safety instructions and the normal routine, you know, "Please fasten
your seatbelt" and "Enjoy the flight", she always seemed to
manage to add in [quite random] dirty jokes. Yes, you heard me, or read me.
Things such as "In case of emergency, the mask will be dropped in from of
you from above, you can put it over your mouth, fasten the side, and *whisper*
breath baby … breath", or "While the seatbelt sign is on, please
fasten your seatbelt, stay in your seat and refrain from walking, running,
screaming or, moaning *straight face*". We thought it was entertaining.
The old couple at the row behind us, I am not entirely sure.
So where was I? Oh, the caves. A little bit of
background from what I remember. The Sudwala Caves are the oldest known cave in
the world and they have some of the second oldest known sedimentary rocks on
earth (for some reason I feel like everything I've been to in Africa is the
[oldest]). There are, obviously, various types of rocks, which people always
seem to manage to be creative enough to give them certain shapes: the nuns
praying, the horse, the devil, the weeping lady, fairies fountain, the monkey
typing on a laptop, the chocolate covered vanilla ice cream (ok, I made up the
last one, but it did look like ice cream, I promise). I have always been amazed
by how caves are formed and how long it took them. Every time I walked into one
I feel like I'm being intrusive on their private life. Just looking at all
these rocks, deep in the heart of the mountain, slowly doing their own thing
and then there are these people who just walk in, putting color lights on them,
making molds and plants grow on them because of the artificial light, screaming
at the top of their lungs to play with the echo, using hammer to bang at them
to listen to different sounds, and more random things. If I were a rock, I'd
get pissed off. No one can just walk in in my alone time, and give me random
names about my shape and make fun of it, because maybe it is not what I mean to
make at all. Okay, I think I had a moment there. Speaking of caves, one minute
advertising. In Vietnam, we have many gorgeous caves that you can explore,
especially those that sit right on top of the ocean and you have to go in with
a small boat or canoe. They recently discovered the largest cave in the world,
and you can come their for rock climbing and I think they want to put in bungee
jumping. For more ridiculous thing, people with money can actually arrange to have a [romantic]
candle-lit dinner in the middle of the cave set up for them (if you want to
invite me out for dinner to impress me, now you know). Tourism, I tell you, is
a surprisingly creative field.
6pm
- we arrived at Old Vic, a backpacker place with a motto "home away from
home". It did give out a really homey feeling, with small garden and
backyard, a medium size outdoor swimming pool, a comfortable living room and
mini bar attached to the kitchen, a cozy dining room with several small tables
and a gorgeous wooden deck with comfy couches and the view of the mountain. We
spent the afternoon hanging out on the deck. It was a relaxing and chilled
atmosphere, except for when people got too excited about the little adorable
puppy in the neighbor backyard, lol. Finally, it's dinner time. What's better
than delicious home-made food after a long day of travelling and packed meals?
Oh I know, a meal with around 5 dishes, out of which 4 were vegetarian. During
the entire trip, Toni, Qamar and I, the vegetarians were always catered to the
core and always got to be served first, even though 90% of the entire meal were
veggies, and usually there was only one dish of meat. After finished a plateful
of curry rice, vegetable stew, jam squash (OMG, I'm in love with this I could
write an entire blog entry about this thing) and salad, I started to treat
myself to a [plenty] amount of dessert. It was Maxine's - our program director
- birthday so there was birthday cake and chocolate cupcake, decorated with
glitter. I felt like I gained lots of weight after this break because every
single meal we had was followed by delicious dessert, and we had like 2
birthdays during the course of 5 days. People had more than one chance to make
fun of me about my love for dessert and Wes has somehow managed to get out of
me several promises to bake him several things. *sigh* I always get overly excited
about baking and [always] tell people that I'd bake for them, I really need to
fix this habit. Anyway, we were all worn out after a long day of travelling,
and we had to be up by 4am the next morning so all of us decided to go to bed
early. I had a great bonding time with Megan, Carimah, Monica, and Toni doing
all the girls talk, and interesting conversations with Spencer and Sam while
watching the hit music videos of the 80s. 9pm - I called it a night.
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| Pic taken by Liz |
I
have always thought that big animals such as rhinos, elephants, giraffes, or
zebras are easy to spot because … they are humongous and they really don't have
that much of a camouflage pattern. I was completely wrong. Even though the tall
grass are brownish-yellow and the trees are green, to spot a grey rhino or
elephant is nothing close to easy. During the two days, it took the
collaborative effort of all 10 of us to spot animals, in addition with all the
people in the other two jeeps. Andraan has an amazing skill of spotting animals
that were like 20 feet away and pointed out to us specific types of animals
while all I could see was a big blob of grey color, that if I could see them at
all. I couldn't possible be able to report all the animals that we saw because
we did ran into a lot of them. We got really up close with an elephant that was
crossing the road and one that was trying to look for food or water right by
the road and completely oblivious of us staring at it from above for like 15
minutes (Quick fact: there are about 12000 elephants in the park and they can
actually hold only 8000. So they actually tried to use contraception on the
elephants but failed to because the elephants got really upset about the
contraceptives.) We found 3 out of the 5 within the first morning: elephants,
buffalos and rhinos (although the rhinos were kind of far away). Other animals
that we ran into: zebras (<3), giraffes, wildebeest, bushbuck, waterbuck,
kudus, eagles, monkeys (Rafiki!), baboons, warthogs (Bumbaa!), random types of
birds (owls, ZAZU!), and a jackel. Andraan said jackels only came out at night
and the fact that we saw it during the day time was extremely rare.
Around
noon, we stopped at a golf court area for a delicious lunch before heading out
for the road again. At this time, the sun was incredibly warm and I managed to
get a decent nice tan just by sitting in the jeep. There were these
passive-aggressive hippos at the place we ate lunch. They were just lying in
the water, with no motion until we got about 5 feet to the water and they
snapped and growled. Never thought hippo could be so angry, I guess I don't
want a hippopotamus for Christmas after all. Due to the heat, all the animals
were no where to be seen around this time of the day (except for the 24/7
McDonalds of course) and some of us were getting tired and dozed off into nice
naps. It was then that the leopard made it appearance and hyped us up. We were
told that there was a leopard sleeping on a tree at one of the road nearby, so
Andraan made an action-movie like move and speeded there. In due time, the
leopard appeared, leisurely walking around while we quietly observed him/her. I
felt like we were in a suspense movie, sitting in a jeep in the middle of the
safari, didn't dare to talk or breathe too much.I have always thought that
leopards are beautiful creatures, but to see one walking among the tall grass
was just breath-taking. Their ability to camouflage is incredible, the moment I
took my eyes of it to get my camera to focus, it took me a little of time to
locate it again. Not to bore you with more details, we watched the leopard for
almost 20 minutes, while it walked around, got into a tunnel, waited for it to
get out of the tunnel, scaring the birds, etc. It was like watching an uncut
version of National Geographic. That brought us up to 4 out of the 5. One more
to tackle: Simba the Lion!
By
4pm, we decided to head back to our rest camp. Andraan was nice enough to offer
to take us on a sunset drive. Another thing I thought I would have never gotten
to do in my life - to watch the gorgeous sunset on the safari, to see the
breath-taking scenery that is often depicted in movies and paintings. Andraan
took us to a spot higher up that entailed a view of Kruger - everything we saw
was Kruger.
"So
until where is Kruger?" - I asked
"To
where the light touches" - Spencer said
Lol,
perfect line at the perfect moment. We watched the sky turned pink and purple
while the orange sun slowly disappeared behind ranges of mountains, turning the
trees into these printed silhoutte against the sky, and sipping beer while
doing it (classy, lol!). To make it even better, we saw a second leopard, up
close. Quick fact: there's only 1000 leopards over 100,000 kilometer squares.
It was one hell of luck for us to spot 2 within a day. We headed back to our
camp to a nice bbq dinner waiting for us. We spent an enjoyable and relaxing
night sitting around the fire - bonding time. At one point we decided to go out
to the outdoor pool and did stargazing. I kept having that scene of Simba
looking at the stars in my mind, lol.
It was
unreal, living the moment, without any worries, under the African sky.
The
2nd day was pretty much the same as the first - animal hunting crunch time. We
really had our minds set on the lions. We did see a lot animals closer this
time: rhinos 10 steps away, kudus right at my nose, and lots of giraffes. At
this point, I voted giraffes the most graceful of all - everything about them
is elegant: the way they eat, when they move, even when they fight. Some of us
saw a giraffe fight and recorded it, it didn't even look like they were
fighting, at all. As much as we didn’t want to, the day slowly came to
an end. When we headed to the Crocodile Bridge, one of the gates, we were kind
of in denial and did not want to leave, especially since we weren't able to
find lions yet. For me, I got my share of zebras and a decent amount of good
pictures, I was perfectly happy. We went back to Old Vic to be welcomed with
more delicious food and more bonding time. During the course of three days,
Monica somehow introduced us to the most terrible song - "Gucci
Gucci", and it kept being brought up as a joke among us. Some of the sentences
in the lyrics kind of became our inside jokes and "motto": "One
big room, full of bad bitches" and "I've got this swag and it's
pumping out of my ovaries" (?). Terrible song, but it was, nevertheless,
entertaining in its own way.
Crazy
Dave (the owner of Old Vic) was an extremely nice and friendly guy, who made
sure that we all had an incredible time and everything we needed while we
stayed, even gave us T-shirts as souvernirs. My first tourist-y t-shirt, lol!
It was kind of sad leaving in the morning. As I settled back and got ready for
another 3 hour long bus drive, I had mixed feelings. The experience was so
unbelievable I wanted to do it again, yet I knew there were more to come, and
they would be just as equally incredible.
[To
be continued]
[az]
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