More Holiday

I think I forgot to mention that yesterday I plunged off of the side of a cliff and dropped 175 feet before a harness strung out above the valley caught me and swung me out across the gorge. They call this a gorge swing. It sounds really good in theory and it looks fun from the top, but something happens in your head when you are about half way down and you realize that the ground is coming at you at about 100 miles per hour. I survived the drop and lived to go white water rafting down the Zambezi today. There were 23 three rapids, most of which were class 4 and 5 (like I really know what that means). Now I am really sun burned and tired from paddling all day. Tomorrow the "bwana" portion of our trip will come to an end as we fly back to Lusaka and then take public transport up to Kasama. Check in again tomorrow, as I may have a chance to blog again when we are in Lusaka.

Holiday

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry. That is how you apologize in Zambian. I am apologizing for my long absence from blogging. The lack of internet access is still my only excuse. Anyway, life in the village is business as usual with the exception of my two new house guests, Howard and Helen the ducks. Now I am on vacation with Dad and so far it has been awesome. We have seen every animal you can think of that lives in Africa (except Rhinos), so I will just tell you one story about some lions.

The first place we visited was the South Luangwa National Park which is one of the most densly populated game parks in all of Africa. For this reason, anywhere you travel within the park you have to go with an armed scout. For the first two days we were accompanied by the scout on all of our game drives and walks. On our final morning we were leaving the park and the scout went out on a walk with some other guests. We figured "no problem," it was a simple hour long drive out of the park with an experienced driver and we would be within the safety of an open bed land cruiser. About half way into our drive out we spotted a pride of lionesses with cubs. Our driver decided that we needed to get a closer look, so he drove over to the tree where they were resting. He circled the lions and proceeded to pull up within ten feed of the pride and cut the engine of the truck. Suddenly I was sitting about ten feet away from five lioness with cubs in the back of a truck with the engine off and no armed scout. Not the ideal scenario. After crapping my pants and fumbling with my camera to take a few pictures, we quickly proded the driver to get going. I will try to get the pictures up some other time.