Our First Visitor & First Safari!

Greg's Cousin Sally's oldest daughter, Colleen arrived on Friday and this week the girls were off for a mid-term break, so we headed to Marakele National Park (which is about 3 hrs North for our first big five park). We were staying at the Guest Cottage at the park, which was about 30 kilometers from the main gate.  Which you would think you could drive in just a few minutes...it took us almost an hour and a half to reach our cottage.  It is tricky driving on little dirt roads, avoiding elephant & rhino poop and trying to to scratch a rental car!  We did manage to see many animals on our way in, we saw our first wildebeest.

Then a pack of monkeys crossed the road in front of us...a Mom even had her baby on her back!

We made it to our cottage and the guys who were taking us on our 4pm game drive were waiting for us, we knew better than to take hungry kids on a 3 hour game drive, so we made the guys wait and fed them first! Glad to not be rookie parents in this case!  The big open, game drive vehicles that you sit up high in are very cool, Charlie was SO excited to go!

Colleen & the girls up high in the back!

Dad & Charlie, Papa O'Brien-Charlie has his trusty binoculars with him!

We see many animal signs (warthog holes, elephant & rhino footprints, we learn how to tell white rhino dung from black rhino dung (white=grass eaters, black=leaf eaters in case you were wondering), we see one giraffe way off in the distance, we see tons of kudu, impala, zebra...but sadly no elephant, or rhino, or lion.  We get to see the sunset and finish our drive at night, the guide busted out big spotlights for the kids to shine in the bush, they loved that and shined them on the moon, the mountains, everywhere! We headed home, chilled to the bone, sitting in an open vehicle and once that sun drops it gets cold in Africa!

We cook our dinner on our "braii" (SA word for charcoal grill) using amazing charcoal that Charlie picked out at the meat store, turns out it was some kind of wood from Namibia-cooked super hot, fast!  

This is a morning picture of "Charlie's Charcoal".  The stars at night were spectacular, no pictures could do them justice!  We could see the whole Milky Way and it was so neat to be out in the middle of Africa all by ourselves!  (there was a high electric fence around our cottage grounds to keep out any lions)

The morning was peaceful, Greg headed out early to do some animal surveillance, by the time I made it out there with the kids, he had his spot picked out where he could watch two roads in the park at the same time...the guide said the animals do like to travel along the roads as it is easier for them too!  He never saw anything but he and Kelly are pretty sure they heard a lion roaring! Here is a shot of morning surveillance!

Tons of acacia trees everywhere, thorns are HUGE, as you can see one next to Charlie's hand, elephants eat the leaves & thorns, and we were warned not to drive over elephant dung because the thorns can still be intact and can puncture your tire!

Colleen & Katie in the morning, looks like Colleen needs coffee!

 

The Hughes kids climb a cool Motswere tree that was in front of the cottage, it is a tree that can live for 1000 years, then stand dead in the bush for another 1000!  Our guide told us they are protected trees that you can't chop down.

We packed out of our cottage and started the long drive out of the park.  Our most exciting animals this time were three warthogs that Colleen spotted, we chased after them down the road (us driving, them running) until they lost us by jumping over a log that was blocking the road they ran down- they really are cool animals and it was fun trying to keep up with them (even though we were cheating!)

We broke up our drive home by stopping in a town called Bela-Bela and going to a place called WarmBaths Resort and buying day passes to an outdoor waterpark.  The water was super warm and Greg had me cracking up at the top of the one big water slide when he was saying should I check with the guy to see if its okay to go?  Why it was funny is its Africa and there is no guy at the top (or at the bottom) the only thing were crazy teenage kids in the middle all along the slide that asked you if you wanted a spin in your tube!  The girls thought they were workers, but we reminded them that in America they would have had lifeguards in the slides, but not here!  What does a day pass run you ask?  (80 Rand, which is about $8.00 a person, you can't go to the movies for that in Massachusetts!)

That's all for now, I have to get to bed, big 4th of July festivities tomorrow, kids have been decorating bikes and wagons all day in preparation, the girls and I baked an apple pie for the pie baking contest!