lions and springboks and dung...oh my!

it was no kenya, but i did enjoy a day on safari while in south
africa. after a very late night out with the staff (including some
girl talk with karen and yas after we got back to the ship), it was a
very early morning up so that shari, yas, karen and i could head two
hours north to the aquila game reserve for our safari. we spent a
little extra money so that we could have a personal tour, and
considering the 30 people we watched climb in to one jeep, it was
money well spent.

we piled into our personal jeep with our guide shelton and one of the
first things we learned is that the word safari is swahili for
journey. if i had known that when i began this blog, i might have
called it safari at sea!

we saw a number of animals, including giraffes, springboks, hippos,
zebras, rhinos and lions. the lions were the most majestic-looking.
we were instructed that we needed to be very quiet around them and
had to avoid making eye contact because they took that as a challenge
and would be likely to charge the jeep.

the animal that we were least expecting to see was a dung beetle.
shelton saw one (how, i don't know since we were moving approximately
30 mph), stopped the jeep and picked it up...dung and all. he was
holding it right over yas, which she was handling pretty well until
the dung beetle fell off of the dung and into the jeep somewhere.
karen was pretty convinced that it ended up in her bag, but i am
happy to report that it hasn't showed up yet among her things.

in addition to the dung beetle, the other highlight was petting a
nine month old lion cub. this "baby" was huge! his paw was easily
bigger than my face, but fortunately i didn't have to find that out
first hand.

so it was an enjoyable safari experience and, like all of my other
experiences on this voyage, left me wanting more. some of the
students who went on a similar safari were disappointed because when
they entered the reserve, they realized that it was an enclosed area
(not a small area, but enclosed all the same). they felt that it
wasn't an authentic african experience. i told them that game
reserves are what we were doing in kenya as well, and they didn't
know that. and in global studies, the professor made a comment that
i thought was really thought-provoking. he said that maybe we need
to reanalyze what our expectations of africa are because many people
had this preconceived notion of what they would see and were
disappointed when it was different.