Safari Days Part 1

Hello!

We did not get eaten by lions or trampled by rhinos! We had a lovely week of complete disconnection while we searched for wild animals. It was an amazing experience in many ways!

It all starts here:

Our open-air vehicle (captor?) where we spent our days with these people:

Our guide, Neil, on the right. His wife, "eagle eye" Val, next to him and two other guests D (American living in Australia) and Andy (Australian) who were with us for half the trip. The second half was just the four of us.

Basically other than eating and sleeping we were in the truck the whole time. Neil and the others picked us up from the airport and we drove to Kruger National Park and started our safari.

Our very first sighting a hippo!

That brownish area in the middle is a hippo butt! This is the only hippo we saw out of the water.

It became clear very quickly that the iPhone is really not meant to take safari photos so consider this a kind of sad appetizer to the amazing meal of photos Mike will post when we're home. He got some seriously great ones.

And mine get better - I promise!

Next up - giraffe

It's so crazy to me how these huge animals can actually be hard to spot. They step behind a tree and they disappear!

These are Impala - They are like antelope. There are so many of them that once you've seen them a couple times you drive right past them. The male Impala make a crazy frog like call to get the attention of the ladies. See all of these? One male is keeping track of all of them. Once he has a group he stops eating and then other male Impala challenge him to take over. Because the first guy hasn't eaten he loses pretty quickly. They only keep their groups for about a week or so. You see a lot of male impalas on their own. Seeing groups like these made it seem like they were having a fun party.

Our first time out also included elephants.