Hello everyone! WOW! What a week I had! I am incredibly busy today trying to pack up my life at AE before heading to Cape Town at 5am tomorrow morning, so this will be short but I wanted to give you a quick summary of what happened last week! It was pretty crazy, but so so so fun! And I don't have time to do pictures on this blog, but I posted some on Facebook. You can click here to look at them! There are ones from the Zulu thing and the Safari! Okay, here we go....
We were divided into 2 groups, and my group did the Zulu experience first. We left early Monday morning and drove for about 4 hours to this Zulu wedding shower. It was quite the experience. Women were topless, the bride-to-be was wearing a white bra, the ground had leftover parts of the cow they sacrificed earlier that morning, multiple girls from our group were proposed to…its was certainly something :). We found out that was just to stall time until the place we were staying was ready, so we drove for an hour on a bumpy dirt road to this Zulu tribal village that was in the middle of nowhere. It was absolutely beautiful though. We saw some amazing sunrises/sunsets that were breath taking. The first night included lighting incense to invite the ancestor spirits, drinking Zulu beer all out of the same cup, and watching them do Zulu dancing. Then we went to sleep in our mud huts. Literally, the walls and floors were made of mud and the roof was straw. The next day, we went on a gorgeous but exhausting 4-hour hike through the mountains. That afternoon, we had time to rest and shower. By the way, the toilet was a piece of wood with a hole cut in it over the ground and the shower was a bucket that poured out water while you were naked underneath the African stars. Kind of a challenge, but really cool! Anyways, that night we ate dinner and then God sent a CRAZY thunderstorm! I’ve never seen anything like it. The lightning lit up the entire sky. It was beautiful!
Starting around midnight though, people got sick. There are a ton of gross details that I won’t put you through but ultimately, 5 people went to the hospital and by Thursday night, 20 out of the 27 people in my group had either thrown up or gotten diarrhea (keep in mind the bathroom we had to use). Completely by the grace of God, I was one of the 7 who didn’t get sick. But that Tuesday night, people were up ALL night taking care of each other and going to the hospital. It was insane.
Wednesday, we drove from the Zulu place to the safari which took forever because we had to pull over literally every 10 minutes for someone to throw up. But we finally got there late Wednesday night and then woke up Thursday morning and spent the whole day on safari!! We saw so many cool things: TONS of giraffes (which might be my new favorite animal), impala, three white rhinos, hippos (they growled at us from the water!), warthogs, wilder beast, and tons of different birds. We were referencing the Lion King the whole time :). That night, we all BBQ’d around a campfire and had dinner together. So fun. Then Friday morning, we woke up at 4:30am to do one last safari, during which we saw a lot of cool things but the coolest were a pack of buffalo, two HUGE white rhinos that walked right in front of our car, and then three beautiful cheetah’s about 20 feet away. It was incredible!!! It was so cool and I’m glad I got to see 3 of 5 of the Big Five.
We spent the rest of Friday driving back to AE and now, it is our last day here. I can’t believe it! It still hasn’t hit me yet. I’m just packing up my room all day, doing a quick mall run, and then doing the Farewell Dinner tonight. So, so crazy. I can’t believe this phase of the journey is already over and we have less than a month left here. I’m leaving Sunday early morning for Cape Town (again, I’ll have no internet) and arrive there on Thursday. I have no idea what the Internet will be like there, but I’ll still blog as much as I can and post pictures if at all possible! Sorry for the lack of detail but I’ll be home in about 3 weeks so I can tell you in person! :)
With love from South Africa,
Alex
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