All I can say right now is wow, wow, wow! I have had an incredible time ending to my stay in South Africa. I started in Kruger National Park, one of the most popular and well known Safari locations in South Africa. I did what is called a self-safari, where I drove my own car through the park. Once you enter the park you are not allowed out of your vehicle. Within a kilometer of entering the park I had a huge African buffalo right next to my car, that is when I knew this was going to be an amazing trip! I drove through the park and saw so many crazy animals in their natural habitat, including the big five. The big five are the lion, elephant, African buffalo, leopard, and rhino. One of the lions I saw was taking a lovely stroll through the bush not far from me. When I found the leopard it was resting in a tree. After watching it for a bit & thankfully as I was taking video as the leopard jumped out of the tree and started strolling along the road.

After leaving Kruger I drove down through the border into Swaziland. Swaziland is a small country that is primarily surrounded by South Africa and borders Mozambique on one side. As I understand it Swaziland is the only remaining Monarchy in Africa. The king is very rich and has something like 10 to 13 wives. I have been told the king is one of the top five riches men in the world. The sad thing is that most of his country lives in extreme poverty. I drove from one side of the country to the other & visit my friend Daryn. Daryn is in the peace core & lives in a small hut next to a local family in a community trying to educate the area about AIDS and HIV. Swaziland has one of the highest occurrences of AIDS and HIV in the world per capita. It was such a great experience to visit her, we get along like two peas in a pod & I learned so much about the Swaziland culture and area. Where she lives there is no running water so everyone must walk to the local pumps and hand pump out their water. Her and I went walking around the area and met a number of the local people. Each person you come across you must greet them in the Swahiti language. It is an entire process that you need to go through with every person you see walking down the stree. When translated it goes something like this: Person 1, “I see you.” Person 2 “yes.” Person 1, “how are you?” Person 2, “I exist.”

Towards the end of our walk we walked past some boys digging a hole. We went through the greeting process and than they told us they were digging for bees to get honey. Both Daryn and I were a little skeptical as neither of us had ever heard of bees that lived in the ground. So we left the boys digging & went and checked out the local dip where the men bring the cattle to dip them in a chemical that keeps the ticks away. When we returned the boys had just found the bees. We watched the guys dig out the last bits by hand and retrieve small yellow and orange balls and big clumps of honey combs. At this point we could see that these were not bees, but some type of other bug that we could not identify. It looked something like a fly. When I get time to look at Google, I will try to Google it. The boys did not know the English name of the bug. Daryn and I tried some of the yellow and orange balls and decided they were not very good, but the boys loved them. The boys than squeezed this awesome honey out from the combs into our hands, mmm amazing honey. By the time we left the boys all the honey & balls were devoured.

After hanging out in Swaziland I got up early and traveled through the rest of Swaziland & got to the airport where I flew into Johannesburg. I than missed my flight from Johannesburg to Kenya, which turned out to be a good thing. I caught the next flight that left late in the night which will allow me to arrive at the perfect time in the morning to meet up my friends before we head out on a safari we have booked. My later flight allowed my friend from Pretoria to come down and hang out with me before I left South Africa. He took me on a tour through some of the townships (ghettos) in Johannesburg and through the city. As most of you would know, Johannesburg is known as one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Most of the crime occurs in the townships. (Just a note for all of those that worry about my safety and sanity, he only took me through the least dangerous ones that the tourist office said would be okay.) The townships are where the blacks live. It is actually quite sad how poor the townships are and that only a couple kilometers away you will have nice rich suburbs where primarily white people live. I am not all up on my South African history, but what I gather from asking around, about 20 years ago South Africa got rid of the apartheid. The apartheid legally segregated the whites and blacks. It is somewhat similar to the slavery and segregation we had the USA. In some areas the affects of the apartheid are very visible, especially in Johannesburg. There is such a separation from the whites that have and the blacks that have not. There are policies that are trying to change this, but from discussions with locals many of these are causing new problems.

I am on my way to meet up with two fo my good friends who have just finished climbing Kilomajaro. I will meet them in Kenya and travel with them for a while starting with a Safari trip through the Massi Mara.

~Laugh & Love Life~