To Travel is to Live

            The past few days have been very busy but also a lot of fun here at CARE! Tuesday was an especially exciting day because I saw my very first wild elephant! That afternoon I was heading down to the river with Yolo and Darcy for their second hour of playing down there. As we got down the hill that leaves to the riverbank, Stephanie, the volunteer that was carrying Darcy, heard him give his little warning call. At first we only saw warthogs, which we see all the time down by the river, but looking to the other side, we noticed what had triggered Darcy’s warning call- a gorgeous bull elephant was walking along the opposite bank! We walked over to our usual play spot on the bank, and watched the elephant as he slowly walked closer to the river’s edge, dipped his trunk down into the water, then brought it back up to his mouth to drink. As we looked across the river, I noticed that there was also a beautiful Nile crocodile out basking on the bank near the water’s edge. In that hour, we also ended up seeing a group of impala, some kudu, and several giraffes all hanging out around the water. The area by the river is definitely the best spot for viewing wildlife, and that afternoon was a great example. After drinking for a few minutes, we saw the elephant crossing over to our side of the river. He hadn’t seemed to have noticed us, but he was so close that we could hear the water splashing around him as he crossed the river! We decided that if he started to head in our direction after making it to the other side we would leave, but thankfully he walked off in the other direction instead. That was the second animal of Africa’s Big Five (rhino, elephant, lion, leopard and water buffalo) that I’ve seen here so far. I’m hoping to visit Kruger National Park soon and see at least two more. The leopard is the most secretive and hardest to spot out of the five, so I have doubts about seeing one of them, but we’ll see.

            Every day this week has included at least an hour or two with the adorable baboon babies living here at CARE. We actually got a new baby boy that arrived a few nights ago. He’s considerably smaller than the others- we think he’s somewhere between two and three months old. The evening after he came in his condition got pretty bad; he was having seizures and for a while that night we all doubted he’d survive. The next morning, though, we heard that he’d made it through the night and was actually doing better. Today he’s back hanging out in the Mountain Lodge with Becky, the volunteer that was picked as his surrogate mother. I just got a break in my schedule, so I spent some time hanging out with him. He definitely seems to be doing much better- when I was sitting with the little guy just now, he was jumping all over me!

            A few of the other volunteers and I are planning to take a break from the baboons for a couple of days, renting a car, and driving to Johannesburg to spend a bit of time there. A few people want to go to the Cradle of Humankind, which is a museum and dig site of some of the oldest human ancestor fossils. There’s also an area near it that offers ziplining and similar activities that a few more of us want to visit, so we figured we’d all go together, book a hostel near there for one night, then leave CARE early one morning to drive down to Jo’burg to have some fun. I absolutely love it here at this sanctuary, but after a while of being here constantly, it would be nice to take a little break and just get out for a while with some of the other volunteers. Since CARE is in a much more secluded area than the volunteer house at White Shark Projects, it often feels like we’re in our own little world here! I often lose track of the days here, and news from home seems pretty alien. On Monday it will be two weeks since I arrived here at CARE. Those weeks seem to have flown by! They’ve been very busy, but a lot of fun!

            Guess that’s all the news for now. Again, sorry for the lack of pictures in these past few blogs. I promise I’m taking plenty, but the terrible wifi here makes it next to impossible to upload them here. If the connection improves while I’m still here I’ll add some. If not, I’ll add plenty of pictures to blog posts that I make when I return home! This post’s food for thought is a quote that I’ve come to love while on this adventure: “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live.”- Hans Christian Andersen