Today we went out to the Plumstead Seventh-day Adventist Church for the service. It was a ways away, but that was fine. The church was fairly large, and had a mixed congregation. We got to sit in the second-to-front row because there were no other seats available for four people. It practically became the front row when all the people in the row ahead of us left.

Across the street and meadows from our apartment building, there is a promenade, backed with a wall that is right in front of the ocean. The evenings are a very nice time to be there as the sunsets are magnificent. Today we went on two walks along the promenade, one to get gelato from a local gelateria, and the other one to admire the sunset and the ocean. It is a very pretty ocean, and at sunset it is very nice.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we all got to hold live candles at a Christmas concert at the V&A Waterfront. We went there because my mother wanted to listen to some Christmas music near Christmas. We are also going to go to another concert at a church in downtown Cape Town. I think that, in the next concert, there won’t be candles for people to hold.

When we first got to the amphitheater, it was packed. We finally found seating, and sat and read for a while, waiting for the program to start. At the start, there was a pop guy that I knew nothing about, but that is not saying much, because I know nothing about pop music. During his music, they passed out candles, and when he was done, we lit them. The wax ran down the side, and if you weren’t careful, you’re fingers got burnt. After several more songs by a choir, we left.

Earlier in the day, we had gone to the Castle of Good Hope. It once stood on the edge of the ocean, but now, it is a long ways inland, due to people carting in rock and soil to make the city of Cape Town bigger. We had decided to do the 11 o’clock tour. When we got there, it was free, which was nice, and when we got inside, we waited for our guide. Our guide arrived, and split the group into two parts: Afrikaans and English. Sadly, the English side was a lot bigger, and I again regretted not having learned Afrikaans when I had the chance. Our guide took us through an arch on a pathway made from bricks made of wood and showed us a cross that South Africans made for lost comrades.

He then took us to a pool that was green and said how the first governor chose the pool to be only for his family to swim in. Now, however, I doubt many people would want to swim in it. We then went on to see the torture chambers, where our guide told us about how the chamber was used: for holding people in awkward positions and then flogging them with a cat-o-nine tails. We then went on to see the ramparts, where there were a lot of cannon, and finally looked at the prison. Some of the doors had names of fake hotels written on them by bored prisoners being sarcastic about their miserable living conditions.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went to the Two Oceans Aquarium in the V&A Waterfront Mall. I had been there before so I remembered some of it, but I didn’t remember all of it. That was proven true when there were things that surprised me about the aquarium, like the penguins and the jellyfish.

We started out this morning after a standard-fare breakfast: toast, cereal, and fruit. We drove in our little gray car to the mall, parked, and went on in to the aquarium. There were whale rib bones at the first exhibit, talking about whaling, and from then on, there were large tanks of fish. There were giant crabs, which freaked my mother out, small sharks, jellyfish, rockfish, etc. We saw a lot of fish swimming around. Eryn and I wondered what we would do if the entire tank on each and every tank collapsed simultaneously. We both agreed that we would go to the nearest stairs or go outside. That was proved to be a good idea later when we saw the predator exhibit, which had turtles, sharks, rays, and other colorful fish. Later, we watched the fish in the predator exhibit get fed, and African Penguins get fed. In all, it was a pretty successful day.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was the first day that the Hobbit movie came out, and we watched it in cinemas in 3D. The sad thing about the movie is that the directors put the movie into three parts, and we only got to see the first one. The second one comes out next Christmas. It is a long time to wait. Still, however, to help use up a small fraction of that time, I will tell you what we did today.

Today we woke up, had breakfast, and jumped into our car to go to the mall. We were going to go there to find an internet café that had mochas and upload some pictures, but we couldn’t find any and gave up on that. Then we all went off by ourselves to find gifts for other people for Christmas. We did that for a long while and then rendezvoused at the cinemas at the pre-arranged time to watch the Hobbit in 3D. It was really good. When the movie finished, we got some ice cream and groceries and then went back to our apartment and had dinner.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Those were the things that we did today; we did the Rhodes Memorial, the Kirstenbosch Gardens, had ice cream, and ate dinner. I will list them out in an orderly fashion, so that it is easier for you to read what I am about to say.

Memorial: The Rhodes Memorial is a memorial for Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia. It has a lot of lions in it, and you can climb all over them. The problem is that they are made of metal and hold the heat, so it is hard to climb on them comfortably.

Garden: The Kirstenbosch Gardens have a lot of biodiversity and different species. There are snakes (one of which we saw) and gardens and lawns. There are, luckily, trees in the spacious and large lawns, so one can sit in the shade and take a nap, or talk with friends.

Ice Cream: There is an gelato place right down the street that actually has a flavor of gelato that they have in Italy-besides chocolate, that is-straciatella. I had it and chocolate fudge and they were very good. There was a restaurant next door, and it had a bakery and lots of tables.

Dinner: For dinner, we went to the place right next to the gelato place and had pretty good stuff. They had salads, burgers, wraps, curries, pastas, and lots besides. I myself got a salad, and it was pretty good, for a salad, that is.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today, after waking up and walking around city center for a while, we, as a family in whole, went putt-putting. I have wanted all of us to go mini golfing for some time (2 days) and finally, I convinced my father and sister and mother to come. I said that it wasn’t going to be windy. I was wrong.

That may have helped my score in the end, but it ruined other people’s scores because they didn’t take into account the wind, and therefore missed the holes. We had a lot of fun, though, and this time, unlike the time when my sister, mother, and I went, we did the blue course, not the orange course. This time, it was harder, but that was okay, and expected. Still, however, I think that my personal favorite is the blue coarse, because I got more hole-in-one’s.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Really, who would name a post ‘scratch patch’ besides me?  I guess that shows that I am original and strange, Eryn would agree with that sentiment. However, though Eryn might think it an important topic for me to discuss in my posts, I will not talk about my strangeness and my originality.

Today we woke up, and went to the V&A Mall at around 2pm. We first passed through a place where my father and I went last time we were here and looked at the Scratch Patch where I had gotten some stones in a bag. We then went to a craft center, where we looked around, before heading outdoors by the wharfs and quays. When we emerged from the building, the first thing that we heard was the sound of the Red Bull Flugtug. The point of the Flugtug is fairly simple: build a human propelled aircraft and push it off a 6 meter drop into the ocean. We never got to watch any of it, but I still think that it would have been fun if we did. What we did get to see was a giant rubber duck that was attached to a yacht and floating, I think it would be cool to have one of those.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Well, if you have read some of the previous chapters in my family’s saga, you will know that Helderberg is a college that is above the town of Somerset West, looking out over False Bay. You would also know that we met up with Andre and Rebecca Joubert at the college and chatted with each of them for a while.

We went today to the college of Helderberg on the slopes of the Helderberg mountain today to go to church. We went to church and got really hot and sweaty, because it was crammed with 600 people and the air was still and muggy. Once finished, we got outside, my father  chatted with some old acquaintances before we left. We then went to a Thai restaurant and ate, before come back to our flat, where we vegged for a while, viz. we sat around, sleeping or reading.

We finished the day with a walk towards the library, followed by a small dinner. In all, it was a fairly good day.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Our Christmas Tree, Before and After

My aforementioned title is, for once, the truth. We did putter around, but probably not in the sense that you are thinking of. As I write this, I see that my hand and arm are covered in glitter, and I know how it got there. However, more of that later. Anyway, we were saying…oh, yeah, about puttering.

Now, to answer one of your probably questions, we actually did a lot of things. And though I said my title was true, it may be misleading. The reason for that is because we, as I said before, did many things, but my mother, sister, and myself all went across the street and putt-putt-ed. That was really fun. From a vantage point atop a small hill, it looks like it is an easy putt-putt course, as there aren’t any large things. However, once on the greens, it starts to be harder. There were lots of slopes, pipes, blocks, and drop-offs, all of them trying to make it more difficult for the player. However, we perservered, and finished.

We also bought a Christmas tree today. Not a live one, but a fake one. Eryn and I set it up after dinner. We also got a bunch of ornaments, and a lot of them exude glitter, so that answers why my arm is glittery.

That’s all for now, Folks!

A while back, I figured out why Antarctica is called what it is called. The reason: because it is the opposite of the Arctic. I actually figured that out a long, long time ago, but still, back to topic. So, in two sentences, I have described the title of my post, one actually, because the first one was just fluff. Anyway, the Antarctic is in the title of my post not because we went there, but because we heard about it. In the following paragraph I hope to tell you how we heard. All ye who have ears to hear, live long and remember.

After waking up this morning and going to the Home Office twice to get an extension for our South African visas, we went up to the top of Signal Hill. From there we could see for a long ways. Out in the ocean, there was Robben Island, which housed a prison. Directly opposite of that, there was Table Mountain. When we were looking out to sea, a man next to us on the lookout commented on how the red ship that was steadily moving away from the wharfs was the boat heading for Antarctica, and how it had his son on it. We chatted with him for a while, before leaving the hill and going back to our apartment.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Well, for the first time in all of our lives, we, as a family, are in Cape Town. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Cape Town is not actually a town, even by English standards. That aside, (the English standards, I mean) it is a city because it houses a lot of people. We were pretty lucky in choosing our apartment, as we are right on the beach next to a lighthouse. Last time I was here with my father, we stayed a little bit up the road.

We started out the day in Cape Point, which we had gone to yesterday, and where, last night, Eryn and I built a fort on the beach. We took a walk to a shipwreck and I gathered a few pieces of souvenir shipwreck. That was fun. When we got back, we got in the car, and, not seeing any baboons, we left. We then went to the de Gama Cross and the Dias Cross. If you have read your history book, you will know that Dias was the first person the round the southern tip of the continent of Africa. Vasco de Gama also rounded the tip. We then drove and drove and drove to the north, and finally arrived at the world famous V&A Waterfront Mall.

A surprising fact about the mall is that it is the most popular tourist attraction in all of Africa. What’s interesting is that people don’t know about the mall, but they do know about places such as, say, the pyramids. Anyway, we shopped for a bit and then went to our apartment, checked in, nested, then went back to the mall for dinner.

That’s all for now, Folks!

I am not sure if that is a real thing or not, but it is close to a real thing because it something like what they had at Boulders Beach in Simon’s Town. Boulders Beach is a beach (really?) on the edge of Simon’s Town, which is the home of South Africa’s Navy.  At Boulders Beach, here is a resident population of penguins that nest there and live there. There were a lot of penguins just standing on the beach when we were there, so it wasn’t that interesting. However, they are really interesting to watch when they are swimming, as they seem as though they have rocket propulsion.

On the other side of a chain of rocks is a shallow lagoon where little kids can play. What Eryn and I found to do there was to go through the little paths between the rocks and try to hide from our parents. It worked out great, and when I tried to find out a way to go through that Eryn hadn’t gone on, I ended up really wet. I had accidently misjudged the distance between the rock and the water, so I had to crawl on top of the water, supporting myself with my hands and toes. It was really fun. Sadly though, Eryn was following me, but wimped out and went an easier way.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Content: A long time ago in a galaxy not far away, my father taught at a college on the continent of Africa, in the country of South Africa, in the province of Western Cape, in the city of Somerset West. That narrows down the choice to two options, one, Stellenbosch, and two, Helderberg College. The answer, and some of you out there probably already know it, is Helderberg, and he taught here as a student missionary. His field of teaching was the one of computer science, and he came to where we are now to teach.

We, by the way, are in Somerset West, and are staying at a nice guest house on a hill in the middle of town, looking out over False Bay. The reason that False Bay is called False Bay is because it is too shallow for a big ship, and they would run aground in trying. One of the byproducts of the shallowness is that the water is warm, and also that there are a lot of little boats plying the water.

We went up to the Helderberg College today, and met with several people of my father’s old acquaintance. Two of those people were married, whose names were Mr. and Mrs. Joubert (prounounced yo-beart.) The last time that I was in South Africa, my father and I came and visited with Mr. Joubert, and looked at his massive collection of stuff, including a blue whale rib bone and a lot of pinned insects. He was a really fun guy to be around, still is, as a matter of fact. What was really fun was watching my mother freak out when he produced an old oil container that now houses a very large puff adder. I think that it was really cool. Mrs. Joubert was different, but she had a lot of stuff from when my father was there, including an old staff and student directory, that, as a key to what was in the book, had a person silhouetted and two words underneath, ‘Stupido Staffo.’ It was very interesting.

The Japanese ship, the Meisho Maru, is a ship that ran aground in 1982, and some of it is still there at Cape Agulhas, the Southernmost Point in Africa. Eryn fancies that the name of the ship means mushroom in Japanese, something that I wish to dispute with her. The main part that is still there is the bow of the ship, facing seawards, like it always hoped and still hopes that someday it will be able to return to the seas. If it ever goes out into deeper water, it will promptly sink, as however high the water is, it is also that high in the boat.

We went at low tide, and that was a good thing, because it meant that there are stones that are right beneath the surface of the water at that time that lead to the ship from land. Methinks that someone put them there, but you never know. Anywho, those rocks were very helpful to me because I wanted (and succeeded) to go and climb on the wreck for fun. My father got a lot of photos too. The main of the ship has a 2 inch coating of bird poo and rust, but that was okay, since you have to walk in the ocean to get to and from the wreck. The wreck even had a tower on the main deck that I climbed, sadly, though, it wasn’t that high up. If you look in the picture, you will see me climbing the poles on the top deck.

That’s all for now, Folks!

That is where we are now, and where we will be for two nights, including tonight. We arrived here at about 2:30 pm this afternoon, and, after checking in at reception, went to the southernmost point in Africa. It is mainly a cemented pile of stones with a plaque on it, saying that that was the southernmost point in Africa. Also, at the bottom, there was a blue sign that said, on one side, Indian Ocean, and on the other side of a line in the center, Pacific Ocean, marking the boundary between the two oceans. There is also a big lighthouse that you can climb and I think we are going to climb to the top of it tomorrow.

However, since you probably don’t know what happened before we arrived at our chalet, I will tell you what we did in the morning, skipping over most of the driving parts. We started out the day waking up in Knysna, but not to stay. We packed up and were ready to go by 9 o’clock and when we said goodbye to our hostess, we left. Our first stop was for fuel in the car, and then for a little bit of food. Those were probably the interesting things that happened during our drive.

That’s all for now, Folks!

If I was a shark, I would move to the Robberg peninsula in South Africa. That is where my family and I went today for a hike along the coast. The reason that I think that being a shark there would be a good thing is because there were a lot of seals frolicking in the water around the peninsula when we walked around it.

The walk was a fairly long one, being much longer than we expected. We started out walking and walking and walking by a cliff edge that dropped down onto seals in the sea below. The seals were surfing the waves and just having a good time, even without the beer. We walked some more and finally came to the end. On the end, there is a really good view of waves. Woohoo…not. However, there were some seals to watch play in the water. We walked along the coast at sea level for a while, going up and down several hills on the way, before coming upon the island. At the island, we went on a ‘danger zone’ before coming to the gap, where we went up and arrived back at the car. It was really fun.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Since we are not in the Congo, or anywhere near the Congo, there is no way that the Cango Caves connect to the Congo. However, they are in South Africa, far away, and still get visited by busloads of tourists, literally.

There were two different choices for the tours, the Standard Tour and the Adventure Tour. We chose the Adventure Tour.  The Standard Tour is, and I quote, ‘An easy walk through the first six and largest and most spectacular halls and continuing through to the “African Drum Room”. A few stairways.’ The Adventure tour, however, is different, and I quote again, ‘A challenging tour, with exciting passages and narrow chimneys, requiring a degree of fitness. For lean people only!’ I wasn’t sure if we counted as lean people, but we made it.

The first part was part of the Standard Tour, then we began doing interesting things. We went through a long, wide, and short passageway for a ways before coming out and going up a really skinny staircase. At the top, we went for a while before going up a really narrow chimney, going straight up. When we finished with that, we army crawled through a tiny hole and dropped back out at the top of the tall staircase. Then we went back the way we came.

That’s all for now, Folks!

So, the first thing on my list of three is Africa, and it’s pretty obvious that there is a reason to that, because, as you probably already know, we are in Africa. However, the other two entries on my list of three are harder to explain, and the easiest way to tell you about it is, I think, telling you the interesting parts of our day.

We woke up fairly early, had a leisurely time breaking fast, before getting into the care and heading east, towards Port Elizabeth. We arrived at the Crags, which is, I think, a small town on the N2 Road that has, near it, four different attractions. Those four attractions are Tenikwa, a cat center, Monkeyland, and Birds of Eden. Those you can probably guess the content of just by the name. We went to Tenikwa and Birds of Eden, but skipped Monkeyland because it seemed like too much money to pay. The last attraction in the Crags is an Elephant Rehabilitation Center where you can ride elephants for a large fee, and touch them for a fee. As I said, we went to Birds of Eden and Tenikwa, a bird place and a cat place.

We first went to Tenikwa, there, we went on a walk through and by the cages of cats such as the cheetah, the leopard, the serval, the African wild cat, and the caracal. Sadly though, we never got to touch them, which was a shame, but still, seeing them was pretty good too.

Birds of Eden was more than we expected it to be. There were lots of different kinds of birds free flying throughout a large mesh dome. There were birds of every kind, from the spoonbill to the parrot to the dove. It was very nice and I think that we got a lot of cool pictures.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was a day in which we didn’t do much, but the main thing that we did was go to the Heads. They are the two large points of land that keep most of the waves out of the Knysna Lagoon. Since they are large and tall, with good views, they are prized property spots, and there are a lot of large houses on the East Head.

The West Head is the one that we didn’t go to and is a National Park, hence the lack of houses. However, that lack is somewhat made up for by the fact that only a little ways down the coast, there is a small town called Brenton-on-Sea. Corresponding with that, there is another small town, this one on the Knysna Lagoon that is called Brenton-on-Lake.

On the West Head, we walked to a view point at both the top and the bottom. We did the one at the bottom first. The way that we used to get to the bottom one was through a small system of caves and down a 5 foot jump. What we found out after we did that, however, that the path just continues and goes around the rock, not through it. On the top, we walked on a boardwalk to three different viewpoints; one facing the sea, one the other head, and the other facing Knysna.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Well, it may not be stormy, but, at the mouth, it sure has a lot of big waves. I know that because I stood in the middle of the mouth of the Storms River today, even though it is 9 meters deep. I could stand in the middle because there was a suspension bridge that spanned the river. There were sadly rules against jumping up and down on the bridge, which I thought were kind of sad, but they still were interesting.

The first place that we went to today was the bridge that spans across the Storms River on the National Road, N2. The interesting thing about that bridge is that it is an arch with a flat platform that forms the road. The builders formed the arch by having the two halves and building them upright, connected to the rock with hinges, before lowering them down so that they connected.

After that, we went to a big tree, and then we continued on to the park at the mouth of the Storms River, and we went across it again, this time closer to the water. In all, we had a fairly interesting day.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Well, we are now (sadly) gone from the Haven. Just like in the game of tag, we are now it, meaning that we will now be the subject of beggars and street sellers, all trying ways to separate people from their money.

When we woke up there, we had breakfast, and then left, taking leave of everyone there. We drove for three hours to go forty kilometers, but now that we are on tar roads, it is much faster.

Anyway, the place that we are fast approaching to is an apartment in the city of Knysna. Tomorrow I hope to tell you more about the place.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today, unlike yesterday, I will go straight to the post after this sentence, skipping all of the unintelligent chatter that I have used lately to fill up my post with words, in short, it is kind of lame, so today, I won’t do it at all.

We woke up this morning, and after having a nice time breaking fast, we piled into the car and drove out of the boom gates of the Haven Hotel. Our destination was the mouth of the much-talked-about Mbashe River. We planned to take a canoe across the river mouth, and we did. My mother freaked out a lot because of the horror stories that we had heard from people about sharks in the river mouth. I’m happy to report that no sharks came up to us and we didn’t even see a dorsal fin. When we got to the other side, we walked a long ways along the coast until we got to a point, before turning back. We found lots of pretty shells and took some of them with us. When we got back to the canoe, we paddled in circles for a while before finally being able to go straight backwards towards the shore that had our car. When we got back to that shore, we drove back to the Haven.

That’s all for now, Folks!

My father has joked several times that, because only girls do horsemanship at the summer camp that Eryn and I go to, it shows the cycle of a girl’s life: First they are into horses, then men, and then they want to go on a cruise.

Now, some of you out there might not think that is true, and I am fine with that, and I will not argue. However, disagree as you may, I still will believe that that is true. What, you might ask, is the reason off all of this useless blabbering, when all of you probably have more important things to do that read a page on a website. I will tell you why, because I will soon disclose the main article of this post.

Socks, Alto, Strider, Teddy, and Rocky are the reasons that I am writing this the way I am, well, mainly Alto, Strider, Teddy, and Rocky. To further your waiting, I will just tell you that the fences around the Haven that are supposed to keep the horses in are partly electric, a fact that I learned the hard way. Anywho, I will finally continue: As I was saying, Alto, Strider, Teddy and Rocky are the main reasons that I am writing this post this way, the reason: we rode them. In this case, we is the inclusion of Eryn, my mother, and myself, and the exclusion of my father. The reason for that is that Socks, the fifth horse, is sore from some surgery and is unrideable.

We rode out the gate and onto the left of the three roads heading off in different directions. After spitting out a lot of spiderwebs that had, until recently, spanned the width of the path, we arrived out on a beach on one side of the Mbashi River Mouth. We rode up the coast for a ways, until Shark Island, before heading back and taking a shortcut back the the Haven.

That’s all for now, Folks!

P.S. Our guide’s name was Dayne, pronounced Dane.

Ahhh… It’s good to be back at the Haven Hotel. It has had some changes since my father and I were here, but is still the same idea.

The Cafeteria/Buffet: In the main building, they have a dining hall, which seats a lot of people, but as this is the low season, not very many tables were full.

For the Kids: There is a playground and a trampoline right down the steps from the pool, and Eryn and I think that they are a lot of fun, especially the trampoline. There is also a pool which is fairly clear.

Places to Stay: There are about 31 cabins to stay in at the Haven, some of them are near the coast, some are several houses away. We are staying in the one at the corner, closest to the pool and the beach.

Horses: Right now, the Haven has 5 geldings. Their names are Socks, Teddy, Strider, Eltor, and another, of whose name I forgot. Socks just had surgery and is unrideable, so only three of us in our family can ride tomorrow with a guide. I hope on of them will be me.

Canoing: There are canoes to use in which you can paddle around in both the lagoon on the beach and also to go across the river. I think we are going to do that.

The Haven Hotel is a Hotel in the middle of a game reserve on the Wild Coast in South Africa. It has lots of stuff to do, from horseback riding to golfing, from cycling to canoeing. My father and I have been here before for two nights, and now we are back with the rest of our family for four nights.

We drove a lot today, and as soon as we got off of the N2, the road quality went down and down, as they say on their brochure, ‘To all those who braved The Road, A warm welcome to The Haven Hotel.’ As we have braved the road, we are now here, and are having a good time. Eryn and I are staying in the room that my father and I stayed in last time we were here, and my parents are now sleeping across the hall in the other half of the duplex.

Tomorrow I hope that we will be able to horseback ride. I hope that that will be fun. That’s all for now, Folks!

Now, perhaps you have heard of falconry, but you have probably not heard of snakery, the reason being that it is a word I made up just now, to describe something that happened today. However, to aptly put a definition to the word that I so thoughtfully made up, I will have to tell you the things that my family and I did today.

We woke up this morning, had breakfast, surfed the web, and then were off. The first stop was the laundry place so that my mother could have some clothes washed by the worker thereof. We then continued on to a place called Falcon Ridge, where they have raptors that they fly around and give demonstrations. When we arrived, there were already a lot of people sitting about, but we did get some seating, which was good. When it started, they flew around an eagle and several kites, and threw some chicken necks to them. From then, they flew an owl, and in that demonstration, I got to hold the owl as it came in for a landing. For the rest of the show, they flew Harris Hawks, the exotic hawks from America, a peregrine falcon, a fish eagle and others. When it was done, I got to hold the peregrine falcon, which is that fastest animal on the planet.

When we finished at Falcon Ridge, we went down to the reptile place, and there, I got to hold an alligator, since they couldn’t have crocodiles, and lots of constrictiors. It was a lot of fun, and I liked it, especially when I scared my mother with the alligator.

My story begins on a bright and sunny day when a tourist family of four decided to go up into the Drakensberg Mountains and take a hike. The four main people in my story have the names of Jerry, Susan, Eryn, and Ethan. They are a family of four and the parents are Jerry and Susan, who have the two others-Eryn and Ethan-as children. However, back to the story.

The family got into their Nisson X-Trail and went to the mountains. When they arrived, they paid at the front desk and started walking. The path that they chose was the one up to the Sphinx Rock. Round trip, that was 4 kilometers. When they got to the sphinx, however, they kept going, and continued up and around, until finally they arrived at a large and green meadow at the top of the mountain.

This meadow was a brilliant one, bright green grass, and bright flowers of every color that you can imagine. They kept walking, as usual, and when they got to the end of the meadow, they went down, down, down, to the valley below.

They continued at this for some time, and the only excitement was when the father saw a puff adder and Susan freaked out about that. Sadly, however, Eryn and Ethan were down below and wanted to see the puff adder. By the time that Ethan had ran back up the stairs, the adder was gone, never to be seen again.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Now, I don’t know if I told you yesterday, but I will tell you again; the Drakensberg Mountains are wet, and with a cloud cover, they can be very dark. Today was somewhat of an exception, but not overmuch. There were a lot of clouds above us while we drove around, in a fruitless search for something to do, but, surprisingly, it was dry.

I might as well tell you about our day, seeing as though I haven’t written much yet maybe I’ll tell you…

…and so we go.

We went out about 11 o’clock to go to the Superspar to by some groceries. We did that, and got ice cream (Magnum, of course) and when we were done, we left. The drive that followed was a fairly short one, and went through lots of villages with buildings made of thatch and cow dung. I think it would be kind of cool to live in a house like that. When we got to the End of the Road in Alaska, we pondered on going into the park and paying a few, but the womenfolk of the family vetoed it, and so begun the long drive back. Oh, and, in the last sentence, I meant Drakensberg, sorry.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Eryn and I have been laughing and joking about how when we meet someone from out of the current country, we tell them our life story and about the trip. Well, usually. Today at dinner was a good example of that. We went to a place called Mistyque, which is also a lodge, and sat on the table next to an older couple from Germany. The talked to us, but after several conversations, our life story hadn’t leaked out. In the end, it did, and surprisingly, I was the one to tell it. When we left, the host, named Lee, asked about the trip, and when I was the one who informed him on everything, he called me our ‘tour guide.’ That was fine by me, though, as far I as I remember, most tour guides get paid, but I guess I get what I get…

That’s all for now, Folks!

When we were in India, there were lots of ads for light shows around the forts that were numerous. However, I think that the light show that I am experiencing right now, as I write this is better than any of those would ever be. It is a light show similar to the one that we saw in Graskop. To cut the suspension that you are most likely feeling right now, the light show is one of lightning. There is lots of lightning left and right. We have not attempted to take a picture yet, but we might. It is a very nice looking kind of lightning, and while lightning flashes on either side, we are driving towards the sunset.

Today, in the afternoon, we went on a drive. The sunset drive is what it was called, and there was a sunset, which was pretty, but there were few animals.

We started out by getting on the truck. Since two of the reserved people were no-shows, we waited a while, before leaving. But just as we were about to go out of the gate, the two others came and got on because they had just arrived. Finally, however, we left.

On our drive, we saw several animals, including impala, zebra, wildebeest, elephants, waterbucks, baboons, vervet monkeys, and two leopard tortoises. All of those are very common except for the leopard tortoises, but you can see those if you look hard enough. In the end, though, we saw several scrub hares in the shine of the flashlights.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Hikipo, the hippo, was a happy hippo. He lived in the Letaba River and had lots to eat at night. His only annoyance was that Jopapi and Manolu, his friend, kept on fighting in the day. He kept telling them that someday, one of them would die from their fighting, but they didn’t listen.

One fateful day, however, everything changed. Jopapi had started another fight with Manolu, and they were snarling. Or snarling as much as two hippos can do. Their mouths were wide open when suddenly, Jopapi pierced the skin on the top of Manolu’s leg. Manolu went down like a flash, and he never got up again. Hikipo was in anguish, and he went all the way across the river and stayed there. Jopapi, however, stayed near in victory, while the hippo that he killed turned into a bloated corpse. Crocodiles were an ever-present annoyance; they kept trying to bite him to see if he was dead. When it turned into night, bugs screamed and fizzled against everything, annoying him when he was out grazing.

That may not be a true story, but the outcome is the same, and there are annoying bugs around.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Well, on the bright side, today wasn’t all like that, but the first part of our morning drive was all that is listed above. I’ll begin this by telling you how it all started.

Tired, and hungry too, Jerry Reeder rubbed his eyes as his computer logged off. It had been a trying day, but he had finally managed to book all of the reservations for Kruger National Park away in South Africa. As it was a Sunday, he was at home, so when his children called for supper, he came readily.

10 Months and 10 Days Later…

Ethan woke to the beeping of his watch. It was 3:30 am, time to get up. He sighed, tired and hungry, missing a good chunk of the night’s sleep. Still, however, today was different, as today he was going to go on a morning drive out on the roads of Kruger before the gates opened for other people. When he got up, he went with his parents and sister to the truck, hoping for an interesting animal.

3 Hours and 5 Minutes Later…

They were back, Ethan was tired, but he was happy, and in his mind, he relayed the following episode:

Shining eyes were what they were looking for, and they found it. The first major animal was a spotted hyena, a little bit further on was a family of six cheetahs; five cubs and a mother. They all took pictures, and when they were finished, moved on. The next interesting animal that they saw in the now light bush was a lion. It was lying close to another, and moving away in the background were several wild dogs. Those were the two most interesting sightings, though the others ranged from elephant to steenbok.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Yes, I know that they are actually called African Wild Dogs, but BBC News, in the article about the little boy being mauled to death, calls them Wild African Dogs. Anyway, today we saw our first wild dogs.

We were driving down the road in our dirt stained gray x-Trail when, after hearing several times that there were wild dogs down a ways, we came upon a plethora of cars sitting by the side of the road. After waiting a while, we finally got to pull in to the best spot on the lot, by slowly acquiring better and better spots to look at the dogs. I want one. We got some good pictures, but most will be throw-aways. But on the bright side: WE SAW AFRICAN WILD DOGS!!! When we finished, we left, and by that time it was actually noon.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Named after Paul Kruger, Kruger National Park is one of the largest game parks in Africa. It has a diverse environment, and this time of year, everything is green. Lucky for us, the grass is fairly short so you can see shorty creatures, but still, it will take a while before I can get used to spotting animals in a bright green background.

We left the Wild Forest Inn this morning, and after visiting a waterfall, we were on our way to the Kruger National Park. We went in the Numbi Gate and started driving. Contrary to what everyone else in the family thought it would be, the first animals that we saw were actually Waterbuck, not what they thought it would be; impala. We drove and got to Pretoriaskop, where we bought a book, before heading down south to Berg-in-Dal. On the way, the three most interesting things that we saw today were two honey badgers running around (sadly we didn’t get any pictures), several lionesses with 6 cubs, and a hyena mother with three cubs suckling. We saw a fourth hyena cub a little bit down the road, but we didn’t know if it was hers.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Diesel is the dog that was at the pizza place that we went for supper. Since the place was actually a pub, there were men at the bar getting drunk and not censoring their language (which was English) in front of Eryn and I because we were children.

Anywho, we went to the pizza place because the place called the Glass House was closed on Thursdays, weird, right? We finally, after getting soaked asking questions, arrived at the pub and were greeted happily by the door by a dog with the name of Diesel.  Since it had a cut off tail, so when it was happy, its whole butt wiggled. Strange. He had a stick that was partially burnt that he kept placing in weird places like behind my butt on my chair. In the end we teased him by, when he wasn’t looking, hiding the stick.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Weather differs throughout all of Africa; in Egypt it is hot and deserty, in Upington it is just right for people who have been to India recently, and here, in the Highveld, (pronounced high felt), it is cold and wet. It may not be too cold to Oregonians who have just come, but for us to enjoy all of this, we need to climatize some more.

When we were driving through the foggy passes, my parents commented on how it looks like Scotland. All you have to do is trade the cattle for sheep and it will look perfect, with rocky crags, small forests, and hilly meadows. If not for the fog, I think it would be the perfect place to live. The fog is like rain, without the gravity. It hangs there, and your vision is so limited that you can’t see 20 feet to either side unless the wind picks up and you can see farther because the fog clears.

That’s all for now, Folks!

There’s a joke in there, and some people think it is a bad joke. I think it is a good joke, but that could just be my opinion. The answer to that joke is ‘dam’ it could be taken as a bad word when said, but my mother would get mad at me if I wrote it here. However, that joke has no meaning to you, unless you know what we did today.

After vegging around for half the day, we left Dennis’s house for the dam. At the dam, we got out of our car with the soft tire and I swam in the lake that was formed by the dam. I wanted to swim across, but my parents stopped me, sadly. Eryn thinks that I would have drowned, but she is wrong and she knows it.

When we were finished with that, we went to the house of one of Dennis’s friends, where there were 7 dogs!!! I never heard what 6 of their names where from the owners, but the little puppy was named Blowme, and it was my favorite. I played with them all for a while while my father and Dennis and someone else changed his tire. When we were finished, we went back home.

That’s all for now, Folks!

I like to think that there was a king of the lions that we saw today, but I’m not sure. There were lots of different colors of lions, from white to Kalahari black and gold to plain old gold. The main family that we watched had all of those colors, and there were eight of them.

We started out the day with breakfast, brekkie as they call it in Australia, as usual. Then wasted several hours with reading and stuff, though some might not call it wasting, before heading off in our car towards the lion farm. The farm was nothing like I expected, I think that I expected to see lions roaming around the bush, looking for new tourists to eat, or something like that. However, it wasn’t anything like that. There were lions in their own separate small cages, separated by kin. If we had known this, I think Eryn would not have been freaking out about us being eaten by lions. I think she was already thinking towards her will and testimony, but since she doesn’t have any of those, that would be kind of hard. We rode in the back of a bikkie to see the lions after seeing all four of their dogs and a rat. When we were finished looking at lions and them looking at Dennis’s dog, Dinkie, we went back to their house before driving back to Dennis’s house.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Okay, though I said it in the series of warthogs, meerkats, and porcupines, how I am probably going to write it is in the form of porcupines, meerkats, and warthogs.

Porcupines: This afternoon, we went on a walk with Oom Dennis on his old property that he had sold. I know that sounds illegal, but we did it anyway. We walked after parking the car along a river, which anyone from Oregon would call a stream or a creek. We walked and walked away from the car, oohed and aahed at lemon trees and fig trees before crossing the river and turning around. When we were almost there, we saw and picked up two porcupince quills.

Meerkats: On our way home from Oom Dennis’s old farm, we went and turned into a private game reserve called Sable Hill, we drove up their driveway and when we got to the top, we saw that the owners had multiple pets; four dogs, several birds, an ostrich, stuff like that, but what was most exciting for me was that they had MEERKATS! In case you haven’t read the rest of my saga, I will tell you that I like meerkats as pets from the first time that I saw them at the AiAiba Lodge in Namibia. Since then, there has only been one other place that had a meerkat, and that one was unfriendly, these two, however, were nice. When we came back from our drive (paragraph 4; the next one) we found out that we were wrong and there was actually another one, this one was a male baby and tiny, being only 3 weeks old. We all got to hold it.

Warthogs: Once on our drive, the awesome people in the back (me, Eryn, my father, and the two daughters of the owner) hung on as we sped (40kph, or about 20mph) up the hill to see the sables. We saw those and when we were finished, we continued and after seeing lots of plains animals, we looked at a warthog hole. To get a closer look, we drove very close, and just as were were about to move on, there was a big thunk and were were stuck in a hole up to the chassis. To cut a long story short, we got out via a tractor and moved on with our lives.

That’s all for now, Folks!

That’s what I’m going to call all of the birds that we cannot name. We have seen lots of those birds, so with me, Birdy is a popular name. Some of the examples of when we didn’t know the names of the birds was in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier National Park and when we saw a woodpecker doing, guess what?, pecking wood on a dead tree to find insects in it. Another time was this morning when my father saw and took pictures of a bird in Oom Dennis’s yard, that one, however, we had a name to, but I forgot it. Nonetheless, I will try to get it for you on the morrow.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Bob woke up, tired and hungry, and tried to hang on to the last moments of his dream, when he was a captain on a large sailing ship, and instead of sailing on water, they were flying. Going fast and smoothly, being on what he dubbed a man-of-sky was the best experience of his life, even though it was only in a dream. He stayed in bed and read on his kindle before being forced to take a shower by his parents. As he broke fast, he noted that Maritjie wasn’t there, and figured that she was at work. After breakfast, he went with Dennis out to see and feed the chickens, which looked like ostriches, and the tortoise.

When finished with that, Bob got into the back of Dennis’s bakkie, or truck, and went to town and the cow pasture. At first they went to the town, and got stuff at the post office and a little shop. When finished, they went out on an unpaved road for a while before, after stopping once, arriving at the cow pasture, where there were a lot of cows. After giving the cows some more food, they left and arrived back at Dennis’s house.

In case you haven’t figured out, Bob is I and I am Bob, the dream is fiction, but the rest was truth, except for the name.

That means old little uncle Dennis. He may not be little, but still, sometimes it just is a diminuative, though that doesn’t properly describe him either. He is a big man with a lot of hair, that I can say without any thinking. He has long hair and an even longer beard.

Well, to put it in short, we are now at his house after a very long day of driving. I have been counting down the days until coming to Dennis’s house for a long time, since Australia actually. At his house, he has several pets, including a tortoise.

The reason that we call him Oom or Oomitjie (uncle or little uncle) is because here you call respected older people Oom or Tannie (uncle or aunt, respectively).

Afrikaans lesson for the day: Witsand literally means white sand; wit=white, sand=sand

Today we drove a lot to go from Upington to Witsand. As I said before, witsand means white sand in Afrikaans and we saw that it did, actually, have white sand. But, as you have no context, I will tell you how we got to where we are now.

We left the Waterfront Guestfarm this morning with the plan to go to Witsand and do both it and Roaring Sands (the lesser known parts in the same area) before we went to bed tonight. We drove and drove and drove after we checked out of the guestfarm in which we are staying. When we arrived several hours later, we checked in to our chalet and went immediately to Roaring Sands. There, my father amused himself by tossing me down the slope of sand. When we finished with that, Eryn and I swam in the pool before getting one sandboard and going to witsand. To get to Witsand, you have to walk down a path before getting to some small dunes with white sand, seeing in the distance the big white dunes. We stayed in the small dune area and I tried sandboarding. It was fun.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went to the Augrabies Falls on the Orange River and I skied. It was very hard, as I kept falling down, but in the end I prevailed and did it. The falls are very large ones and they are famous for the lizards that sit on the rocks and do pushups and other exercises.

Back to water skiing. I didn’t fall as much as I did yesterday, but as with yesterday, JJ pulled me on his jetski. There was a pattern, though; for every time that I fell, I did well one time. There are no stairs from the bottom of the canyon up to the view points, so you have to pretty much rock climb to get to the top again.

Ok, your imagination has probably gone wild by now, and that was my point. But now that I’ve had my fun, I’ll tell you the real facts. We did go to the waterfall and stayed there for a while, but we did NOT even touch the water, even though it was the same river that runs by the place in which we are staying. When we got back, I skied and did one full loop without falling three times, two times in a row, the other one was a different round.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today I went water skiing. In all actuality, this was my first time, but I like to think that I’m an old hand when it comes to skiing on the water. As it happens, since today is a Monday, the water-space was clear so there was only the wake of the jet-ski that was pulling me.

When you look at a good water-skier, you see that they get up out of the water quickly and go around and around, across the wake and back, until they are done and go back to the dock. Well, it looks so easy, but I have firsthand experience saying that it is not easy. For one, you have to get your balance just right so that you don’t fall forward or backward, and two, you have to hang on.

When I started with JJ in the jet-ski, he went fast and I fell. That happened a lot before I finally learned something and got out of the water but forgot to stand up more, so I was squatting on the skis, I fell. This went on for some time before I finally got up out of the water and skied a ways before falling down again. When I finished, I had almost done a full turn.

If my father puts the pictures up, you will see that Eryn and I went around and around in an inner tube in the river, however, what you don’t know is what it feels like. I’ll tell you, shall I?

You are on the tube and hanging on for dear life, the boat that is pulling you seems to be going faster and faster, suddenly, you are at the corner, the most dangerous part, and hang on and try not to flip over or fall off until they finish turning. When they finish turning, you go across their wake and seemingly fly across the water in the air, before falling back down with an ear-splitting crack to the water.

That is the main thing that happens when you are in the inner tube behind the boat. Mainly, if you don’t hang on tight enough and don’t balance correctly, you fall off. Today I fell off a lot, but each time I learned something new so that I could ride for a longer period of time the next time.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The river outside the Waterfront Guestfarm is called the Orange River. The problem is, it isn’t orange, it’s green. That was fine though, all said and done, because it wasn’t that cold.

We started out this day going to church, and after a service, we left and said goodbye to all of the people at the church (about a dozen) and headed back to our guestfarm. When we came back, I saw some boys going into a boat, and looked down forlornly on them, hoping that one of them would see me and invite me to go with them on the innertube that was being dragged around from the back of the boat. They didn’t do that, but when I continued looking forlornly, the son of the host invited me to ride on the back of his jetski with him. I did that, and that was fun. When I got back, as soon as I started to sit down, I got invited to ride on the back of the same boat that I saw earlier. This time, they had their sister Carly with them, and Peter, Carly, and I all rode for a while.

By the time that they had to go, Eryn had ridden (and fallen off) and I had ridden a lot and made some new friends.

That’s all for now, Folks!

There was some sort of fiesta today, but since we aren’t in a Spanish speaking country, it wouldn’t be called a fiesta. Nor would siesta be called siesta…maybe nap, or rest. In any case, we went to some sort of fiesta today at the new place that at which we are staying. The place is called the Waterfront Guestfarm, and every year they host an annual party. I guess it was our luck that brought us here on that one day in a year.

After driving for 2.5 hours and taking naps for some of the time, we arrived in Upington and went to the mall. At the mall, we went to several stores to look for items of which we were in need. We bought the always-needed candy, sunglasses for Eryn and mother, and more data for the phones. After doing that, we continued to the guestfarm in which we are staying.

When we got to the parking lot, it was full of cars and we had to go around to the back to get parking space. As I said before, it was an annual event that the family hosts every year and we were lucky to come on that day. After checking in, we went to our rooms and went to dinner, which we had at the party. We ate chicken and ice cream and I drank an appletizer before we went back inside to the warmth of the rooms to go to bed.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We saw another leopard today, and like most of the pictures that everybody has, it was sitting in a tree. Most of the time he (or she) was laying down on a branch, but from time to time, it twitched. My father commented on how it would be fun to be a leopard; take a nap all day and tease tourists with giant cameras by being still until the tourists are about to leave and then twitching, making them try to turn back on their cameras and start shooting at the slightly different posture.

Today we also saw several lions, and tried to get pictures of some, but most of them were in the bush, way at the back. However, when we went on our routine evening drive, we saw a lioness that was sitting on the outside of a piece of bush that she was hiding in earlier that day.

As an afterthought, I would hate to half to walk across the bush all day, because lions can be 3 meters from where you are standing and still be perfectly camouflaged.

Well, we saw lions, but for bears and tigers, they were as scarce as boar feathers, if you get my drift. If not, then what I mean for you to understand is that we didn’t see any. Not at all surprising though, considering that tigers and bears don’t live in Southern Africa, or at least they didn’t when I last checked. Still, however, as I said in the first sentence, we saw lions.

In all actuality, we only saw two, but since we saw those two four different times, it seems like there were more. It was a pair of lions, male and female, and the male one wasn’t that old, so didn’t have one of those giant black manes that the lions of the Kalahari do, but still there was some dark hair in the mane. He and his female were, um, procreating, to put it one way, and stayed in that area all day.

We also saw an African Wildcat, which are about the size of a regular cat, and some people cross-breed them with normal cats. However, the one we saw was, as far as I know, pure bred. It had black stripes on its legs up to the knees, and was gray all over besides that.

That’s all for now, Folks!

It was running away from us at the time, but we still got some okay pictures. We were going up the side of the river when I said in a somewhat bored tone, “Oh look, there’s a cheetah.”

And my mother was like “Where, where, where, let’s take a picture!!!!!!”

But by the time the cameras were rolling, it was moving up and out.

Later that day, when we were driving back from yet another drive, having seen nothing new, really, after stopping to comment on the dead giraffe, we saw a car hailing us, saying that there was a pair of lions up one kilometer. We continued, and after only half a kilometer, we saw the pair of lions, a male and a female. The male had mane, one of the black ones that are unique to the Kalahari, and the girl looked just like all of them, female lions, that is.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Some of you know about this park and probably, when any of you went a while back, you knew it as the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. Now, however, it is called the Kgalagadi Transfrontier National Park, being from the fact that it is in two countries, but has gates to three; Botswana, Namibia, and the Republic of South Africa.

Today we went to that park and are staying here for 4 nights; one night at Mata Mata, two nights at the Kalahari Tented Camp, and one night at Twee Riverien (two rivers).

When we legally left the Republic of Namibia, we arrived at the Mata Mata camp and turned right, going along the river road to see as many animals as possible. We saw the ever-present springbok, the gemsbok, the wildebeest, the jackal, and the vulture. What surprised us all was the quantity of vultures that was in the park, there was almost one in every tree, so many that we didn’t take too many pictures, knowing that they all would be there tomorrow in their camel-thorn trees.

That’s all for now, Folks!

After 25 days in Namibia, I have come up with several notes on the notably notable Namibia. Then again, having been here only 25 days, I doubt that anything that I have to say is noteworthy, but still, I will tell you what I have come across:

In Namibia, you are a park worker, a tourist, or a miner. As far as I have seen, there are lots of mines that need workers. There is also so much land mass dedicated to National Parks that there are lots of jobs available because of that. And last, in part because of that land mass, there are lots of tourists flocking to Namibia to see either dinosaur tracks, the ocean in Swakopmond, or jostling one another to get into parks such as Sossusvlei and Etosha. Indeed, as far as I can tell, there are only three other kinds of jobs that I can think of, and two of them cater to tourists. They are 1) Owning places to stay for tourists 2) Being a waiter at a restaurant, 3)Owning a farm out in the middle of nowhere and farming cattle, sheep, or goats.

That is my main note on Namibia, live long and remember, all who have ears to hear.

We are at a new place tonight and it is in the Kalahari Desert. It is a farm that farms sheep, cows, and goats. Some of the female goats are pregnant, and others have newly born kids. Of the sheep, as far as I could tell, there were no lambs, but since we were so far off, it really is hard to tell. Of the cows, we saw few, but we still saw lots of cow pies on the path.

Anyway, we went on a walk just to walk, and when we got to the first hill, I ran up it.  We continued on like that for some time, before turning around and heading back to our temporary home that has a zebra skin on the floor.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Joe. He was a very holy person, but didn’t get baptized until he was 21. Now it came to pass that he drank some, even though he went to church every Sunday. When he went to church and got baptized, the priest said to him, “You are now Bon. You will not drink, you will not smoke, and you will to do drugs.”

When Joe got home, he opened up his fridge, and took a bottle of wine from the shelf. He filled up a bucket with water and put the wine in it. When he finished, he then said to the wine, “You are now orange juice!”

How can you tell the difference between a mountain zebra (Hartmann’s) and the plains zebra (Burschells)?

The plains zebra is white with black stripes, while the mountain zebra is white with black stripes.

How do you make a cat bark?

You pour petrol over it, blowtorch that, and it goes WOOF!

How do you make a dog meow?

You slice it in half with a chainsaw and it goes reeeooow!

Vlei is pronounced flay and today we went to a vlei, two vleis to be exact. Their names were Sossusvlei and Deadvlei. Since the park is a long ways away from where we are staying now, we left early in the morning to get to the park when the gates open so that we could do the dunes while it was still cool outside. When we got into the park, bought our permits and drove to the parking lot at the end of the tar road, we started walking the five kilometers to the vleis.

At first we walked along the road, moving to the side when the shuttles went by. One might ask why we didn’t us the shuttle, and the answer is because my father wanted to walk, which was fine by me. About a kilometer in, we started walking away from the main road and towards some dunes that looked big. We walked towards those and then climbed them, only to see that there were still a lot more dunes to go across. This went on for some time before we finally got to the vlei, which means marsh in Afrikaans. The first one, Sossusvlei, was, of course, dry, and we walked across it to the parking lot. From the parking lot, we went to the road and over to Deadvlei. The walk was two kilometers, but we made it. On the other side of the vlei, there were little black spots moving up a big dune. When Eryn identified those as people, we realized just how big those dunes were.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Wikipedia says that: The meerkat or suricate, Suricata suricatta, is a small mammal belonging to the mongoose family. Meerkats live in all parts of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, in much of the Namib Desert in Namibia and southwestern Angola, and in South Africa. A group of meerkats is called a “mob”, “gang” or “clan”. Meerkats are primarily insectivores, but also eat lizards, snakes, scorpions, spiders, plants, eggs, small mammals, millipedes, centipedes and, more rarely, small birds. Meerkats are immune to certain types of venom, including the very strong venom of the scorpions of the Kalahari Desert, unlike humans. Meerkats are small burrowing animals, living in large underground networks with multiple entrances which they leave only during the day. They are very social, living in colonies averaging 20–30 members. Animals in the same group regularly groom each other to strengthen social bonds.

In case you haven’t guessed, there are meerkats where we are staying right now. Well, actually, there were meerkats, now there is just one meerkat living in the maze of twisty little passages, or twisty little maze of passages, or little maze of twisty passages, or- you get the point. It lives in a maze of tunnels in the shade of a small acacia tree in the middle of the driveway. As I was saying earlier, there used to be more, as in one more, but it died at nine years of age, leaving the one year old to fend for itself in the world of humans.

Tonight when we were having dinner, our host told us to be careful about snakes and scorpions around our house, which is half a kilometer away from the main building. The reason being that since there aren’t meerkats to eat all the bad things, the bad things like it there. As an afterthought, meerkats even eat mambas!

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we saw a lot of snakes; from boomslang (tree snake, literally) to black mambas to zebra snakes. All of those are deadly poisonous, but luckily, none of us got bitten because there was a wall of glass seperating us from the snakes. How, one might ask, and the answer is ‘We were at a snake farm.’

As you heard from the first paragraph, we went to a snake farm. That snake farm had more than snakes, though, it had lizards and scorpions too. However, snakes were what they had most of.

After paying the admission fees, we went in side and turned left, going into the left wing of the complex. In there were snakes that I had never heard of before, so I skimmed through that before going to the middle part, where there were boomslang and zebra snakes. I looked at those for a while, quietly laughing when the boomslang tried to go through the glass, before moving on to the right wing. In the right wing, there were two black mambas, several scorpians, and several pythons. Both of the black mambas had shed recently, so there were skins on their floors. When we finished that, we left, sadly not paying the money to hold Dodo the python

Today, after lots of work on my part, Erym, Father, and I went quad biking on the dunes to the south of Swakopmond. The retailer that we used was Outback Explorers, and we went for an hour and a half. The first thing that we did was get our helmets. Since they obviously didn’t want us to get our hair on the inside of the helmets, they made us put little orange hair nets around our heads to protect the coating on the inside of the helmets. My father was the first one to get his helmet, and it was blue. I was next and got a dark gray one with a retractable visor since I didn’t have sunglasses with me. Eryn got the same style of helment as mine, but hers was bright orange. Once helmeted, we walked over to the large assortment of quad bikes. There were blue, red, and dark green. The dark green and blue ones were Yamaha Grizzly quads, and they had automatic shifting. The red ones had manual shifting and none of us wanted to go on those. Since this was our first time on quads, we got the three blue quads in the front of the garage while our guide went in a red quad.

We left in a large cloud of red dust, our wheels spinning to find purchase on the slippery sand. We followed our leader and drove up the dunes towards the biggest ones that we could see. Them being the closest, they also blocked out everything behind them, so saying that we went towards the biggest dunes that we could see isn’t that hard. We went for forty-five minutes before stopping and the guide took Eryn and I both on joy-rides while he made Father follow behind him. Lucky.

We rode back in silence, save for the roar of the engines and the sound of squeeky brakes. We went across the river again and when we got back, we were all glad that we had quad biked.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Wikipedia says that: Dune 7, which is the highest dune in the world, not Big Daddy, as it’s the seventh dune past the Tsauchab river before dune 45 on your right handside toward Sossusvlei (note that this should not be confused with another “Dune 7” found in Namibia, near Walvis Bay

We didn’t go to the big dune 7, but we did go to the other Dune 7 just east of Walvis Bay, which is south of Swakopmond. We drove the 45 minutes to get there, and when we got within sight and saw tiny dots moving slowly up the side, the people with the sharper eyes identified those as humans, and then we started thinking of the long climb ahead of us.

Gravity was against us, when we were going up, what with slippery sand and all, for every two feet that we went up, we went down one. That was very tiring. Unless it has been really windy or a lot of people have gone up the part that my father and mother went up, you can see their zigzags as they went up the mountain. As I was the first one going up the slope and was about a third of the way up the slow climb when the others started. Since it is a lot faster going along the top, I went up to the tallest point, which is pretty high, stood there, and walked almost all the way back to where I started when I met Eryn coming up. My father came up too, and we started what you might call rough-housing, as in I would try to push him off to one side, but he always succeeded in pushing me over.

When we went back down, I decided to do something really fun to get down: rolling. If any of you ever feel the urge to roll down the side of a tall sand dune, resist the urge. It is most uncomfortable and you get sand in places that shouldn’t get sand in them. Needless to say, I got down eventually, walked back to the car, and we were off.

You probably do, but since my mother says that that is inappropriate, so I won’t talk about your flatulence. However, I will talk about gas, or fuel, to be biologically correct.

We left our flat to go towards Henties Bay, which is north of Swakopmond. On our way, we stopped at a Shell station to fuel up and top off the tank. When we got there, Lots of servers wanted us to go to their pumps, and my father chose the one that he thought would be the fastest. When we pulled up behind an old gray car, their hood was put up and the attendants started dinking around with the engine. While they were doing that, other people appeared and surrounded our car and started washing the windows and pouring water over the car itself. We sat through that, and when we finally pulled up, our car was almost spotless. While the tank was filling, they attendants asked if they should do stuff with the engine, and this time, we declined. When my father got out to pay, the gathered attendants tried to guess where we were from, and when he said yes to America, they started singing the national anthem.

That’s all for now, Folks!

A lighthouse is supposed to provide light for the passing ships to show that there is land there. Today we went to a lot of places and there are many stories that I could tell. What follows is but one of the great multitude that should be voiced:

Ethan woke up, freezing cold. Why had he been so careless the night before and not put the covers on straightly and correctly. He turned, and saw Eryn sleeping there so peacefully in the other bed, so opposite of how she was when she was awake, before going back to sleep.

When Ethan woke up for good, it was several hours later and he was well rested, seemingly ready for whatever the day might throw out at him. After taking a shower and, of course, styling his newly cut hair, he left the bathroom and hurried towards the dining room from which delicious smells were coming. He ate breakfast hurriedly, pausing only to laugh at some weird jokes that his father told him, before going back to his book that he was reading.

He read and read, and when he looked up, he saw (and heard) that his parents weren’t home, and gleaned from Eryn that they were at the Laundromat, doing laundry. Since it was freezing cold again and since his jeans were being washed, Ethan curled up on the couch and did his homework like a good little child, waiting for his parents to get home.

When they did get home, they doled out all the clothes to their rightful owners before the whole family left to see flamingoes at the head of the Swakop River. They stood there and watched flamingoes for a time, before going to the Fruits and Vegies Market on the main road to restock on food. There, they got candy and soda, fresh loaves and apples, and anything else that they needed. They finished that and got home only to unpack the groceries and leave again for dinner, going to a lighthouse that was somewhat Italian with a lot of seafood. When they were done, they left and went back home.

That’s all for now, Folks!

There are lots of different kinds of crystals, and today, we saw a lot of them; the reason being that we went to the Krystal Gallery in Swakopmond. The Krystal Gallery is a large building that houses lots and lots of crystals, ranging in size from the size of a fingernail to ten times my size. Today we saw mainly the larger ones.

We got buzzed in to the gallery and paid the N$64.00 to get in before heading off into the ‘cave’ that was supposedly an exact replica of the one in which the largest crystal formation was found. It was a long passage. A twisty little maze of passages, or a maze of twisty little passages, or a little twisty maze-
you get the point. When we got out, the first thing that we saw was a giant crystal formation about ten times my size and it was green. It was sitting there and we took several pictures of it before looking around the cavernous hall some more. In the center, there was another large crystal formation sitting on a pedestal in the middle of a small fountain, and right beside it, there was a carving made out of emerald and something else that was black, making it very pretty. There were more crystals throughout, and upstairs were displays of the nicer looking specimens, like pyrite, black tourmaline, and watermelon tourmaline. When we finished up there, we went back downstairs and Eryn and I got some small tumbled rocks before we all left and went back to the car to drive away.

That’s all for now, Folks

A song and a sickness. Today I only worried about the fever. There are two cats where we are staying, and the male one, the one with the fluffy tail, likes to scratch me. Luckily, the fever is not very harmful, so I don’t have to worry. Anyway the point of this paragraph is that there are two cats here.

The two cats are black cats, and one of them is like my cousin’s cat named Jade; the reason being that they both are black and follow people around everywhere and love to be rubbed. Today I saw and rubbed both of the cats a lot, though the male one scratched me and drew blood twice. My favorite is the female, for when we go inside, she waits patiently by the door until one of us goes back out again, or until it is dark.

There are also two ducks here; one female and one male. The female one is brown (ugly) and has a cut-off wing so she seems lopsided in everything she does, including chasing the male. The male one is prettier, and seems to tolerate having the female chase him, though at times, he has to run away and jump into the pool for an escape route when the female gets too vicious.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Mitjie is a young meerkat that is a pet at the AiAiba Lodge in Namibia. We first met him when we went into the lodge and saw him lying on his stomach on the gray concrete flooring of the lapa. Opposite of my mother’s directions, I sat down, and it came to me. Right as the employee said ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t bite’ guess what, it came up and bit me on the leg. Not very hard of course, but still enough to be a surprise. As it turns out, its open mouth seems to go before everything that it does, and his little teeth bite into whatever moves. It never broke the skin, so it was pretty harmless. When my father sat down, it ran to him and sank its jaws into his skin, taking off maybe the first of seven layers of skin. We both played with him, before heading off on a walk to see the bushman drawings that the lodge is famous for. Right before we left, though, some warthogs went across the yard, and the meerkat, since it is a baby, started suckling on a warthog. When it bit the warthog on the nose, the all ran off, and we did too, but in a different direction, towards the hike.

When we came back, the meerkat was nowhere to be seen, but when we looked around after ice cream, there it was, digging holes in the ground. It came to us and we petted it, while it bit us. By the time we left, I wanted a meerkat for a pet.

Eryn figured out what makes an Australian accent an Australian accent; make all the vowels into a long ‘i’ sound, so the title of this post would be pronounced something like ‘trikes ine rikes’ or something like that. I don’t know why, but Eryn was saying stuff like g’day mate or other such phrases in her new and weird attempt at an Australian accent tonight at dinner.

Today we went to see the dinosaur tracks that the farm is famous for. There are two main places where tracks are visible. One of them just has several sets of small tracks, and the other has a lot of big tracks. When we went this morning, we first stopped at the little tracks, to see what they were about. They are about three inches long from the tip of the largest of the three toes to the heel, and their stride is about one foot. After looking at those tracks in the sandstone, we continued up the tilted rock and came upon the big tracks, which are maybe a foot from the tip of the largest of three toes to the heel with a stride of about one yard. There were also several other sets of prints, or ‘spoors’ as our host calls them, and we sat up there and looked, while also using the phone reception that was so scant and spotty in the valley. In the evening, we went up there again and our host told us more about the sandstone and the ceratosaurus tracks.

Snakes, snakes, snakes…there are lots of snakes. Though only about 25% of the snakes in southern Africa are poisonous to people, there are still a lot of those type. Most of the ones that aren’t poisonous to people are pythons or small snakes. Our hosts have encountered snakes on various occasions, and the following are just some of those adventures:

In the campsites, there are some showers with water, along with toilets. Sometimes, when people leave those places, they don’t close the doors all the way. There was a woman who either did that, or someone in her party did that who went in to take a shower. Now, in the shower there is a big stone block that you can put your feet upon to scrub your leg without having to double over. This woman was taking a shower, when suddenly, out from under the rock, came a millipede. Now, of course, this woman probably had been stressing about snakes, and the sight of something coming out from under the rock was too much for her. She screamed ‘SNAKE’. At the house, Reinhold, our host, heard that scream and grabbed his revolver to go and shoot the snake. But when he got there, all he saw was a millipede.

We had a good laugh about that one, my family and I, remembering the first time that we had gone to Costa Rica and the parents had stressed to us about how there were lots of poisonous snakes there and if we saw one, we should get them. What happened was this; on our first day, we stayed in a treehouse. Eryn and I were playing down on the forest floor, when, suddenly, Eryn saw a millipede at the bottom of a small trench. The same thing happened for my father as it did Reinhold, and we have remembered it ever since.

Before dinner, Reinhold showed us a picture of a python coiled up in the grass and said, “Mary, the python” we laughed at that, and then he went on to tell us that Mary was a python that was shedding, and since they shed over their eyes, too, Mary stayed by water all the while. He told us that she sat there by the dam for a week before she finished shedding and left, never to be seen again.

Once, in the house, Reinhold and Adele thought that they heard a snake under the couch. Adele got down on her stomach by the china cabinet and proceeded to shine a light under the couch. The snake, however, was actually under the china cabinet, and when she got down, it spit it’s venom into her face. She immediately washed her face, and then they started to chase it out of the house. They chased and chased, and when it got near a big battery, it accidently touched both terminals at once and caused an explosion, blowing itself to kingdom-come while it was at it.

The black mamba is one of the most poisonous snakes in all of Africa. Once upon a time, there was a black mamba. It wanted shelter, so it went into the dog box by the screen door to the house. The owners heard the noise, but when they looked, the dog was in the box too, so it might have hurt the dog. After getting the dog out slowly and carefully, they took a shot, and that mamba didn’t see another day.

Those are four of Reinhold’s snake stories, I would bet that if I asked him, I would learn more, but then I might bore you with all of the stories.

That’s all for now folks!

Some people say that dinosaurs did exist, some people don’t, but nonetheless, there is some evidence that they did indeed exist, along with the fossils that have been dug up and put into museums. The evidence are merely tracks, made a long time ago by something walking across Namibia, though I doubt that the area that we call Namibia was actually called Namibia. Anyway, that place is called Dinosaur Tracks Farm, and rightly so, for it is a farm that has tracks that are like no others that there are today.

We left Etosha National Park this morning and went south from Okaukuejo Rest Camp towards the Andersson Gate. We, after stopping twice, once at a watering hole and once to take pictures of two hyenas by the road, arrived at the gate and left the park, on the road south. As the drive was no great distance, we arrived at a reasonably good time; one o’clock. We met with our hosts, a tall, old man and his wife, before settling into our rooms, reading, and napping. Tonight we had a good dinner of macaroni with cheese and tomato sauce and a salad. When we got back to our two rooms on the block of four rooms, we got ready to go to bed. Tomorrow we will go and see the dinosaur tracks and probably take a lot of pictures.

Of course, there aren’t wolves here, but what I’m talking about here is a watering hole called Wolfsnes. But sadly, we didn’t see any mammals there; only birds. However, we did see a lot of mammals at another waterhole, called Okondeka.

When we first got there, the only animals that we could see were zebra, wildabeeste, springbok, and ostiches. Then, suddenly, out of the bush, a lion springs up, and all the animals run and flee as it stands, only to sit back down again and the plain falls back into its usual sounds and sights. But no, it is not to be, for right as everything gets settled down, another lion pops up, this tme, right in the middle of all of the animals, scaring them off in all directions. Then the lion lays back down and all returns to normal, this time to stay. The lions seem to be asleep, but no, when we pull up a little, there, right beside the first spotted lion, is a cub, just sitting there. When we look right, there are three more lions sitting under a tree and napping. Since those are far away and hard to take pictures of, we head back to the camp.

That is the end of that tale, hear and remember.

Did you know that rhinos can roar and growl? I didn’t, but tonight I got proved wrong at the Okaukuejo Watering Hole. Okaukuejo is a camp situated in about the middle of the park going east to west, but it is just south of the middle going north to south. We are staying here for two nights, just as we stayed at Halali two nights. It seems to be a bigger waterhole, but the pool is a bit smaller.

Anyway, back to the rhinos…we had seen none at all today when we arrived at the Okaukuejo Camp. We ‘nested’ and Eryn and I swam in the three small pools. When we were done and got back, Mother had a meal cooked and ready for us. We ate that and then hurried to the watering hole for sunset, but NEVER forgetting Magnum Bars in our haste. When we got to the water, we saw several giraffes, a gemsbok, some springbok, and some jackals. We then sat down to watch and wait to see what would happen when it got dark. An hour later, three rhinos were around the watering hole, two of them were fighting, and the other was taking a drink. The fighting ones were growling and roaring at each other, and then, when the little one charged, the big one fled, but came back and beat the little one and got the rights of the watering hole.

Guess what!! we saw a LEOPARD!!! It was sitting on the ground near a watering hole trying to figure out what to do with its kill, a kudu, which was five times its size and bulky, too. We watched it for nigh on two hours, and what it succeeded in doing at long last was dragging the kudu behing the tree, eating the entrails, and leaving. Though that was the only new thing that we saw today, we did see other animals, such as gemsbok, springbok, impala, zebras, kudu, elephants, giraffes, and rhinos.Most of them were just sitting under trees, but some of them, like the elephants, were playing in the water, which was mostly mud.

When we got back from our drive, Eryn and I swam, ate burgers, and then went to the watering hole to sit through three hours of sitting and seeing only a couple rhinos and jackals. While we were sitting out there, we heard thunder, saw lightning, and felt a little rain, but other than that, it was a regular night by the watering hole.

As I have said before, Etosha was the biggest game park in the world before it shrank. Still, though, even now there is a fair amount of land; 22,912 square kilometers. Thus far, we haven’t seen much of it.

We started out the day at Onguma Bush Camp and left pretty early, set on getting in the gates soon. We got in the gates fairly quickly and the first animals that we saw were Damara Dik-Diks. We saw a bunch of those before moving up on the size a couple of times. We saw a giraffe! Not that they’re that rare, but seeing on is still kind of nice. We then went in to a rest camp to try to pay for the park and when we came back, there were banded mongooses in the grill of our car. They got scared by us and ran off, but not before we could get some pictures.The next place that we went to that was exciting was a watering hole that had zebras, kudu, gemsbok, impala, springbok, warthogs, wildabeest, giraffes, and even lions! We took pictures and waited to see if the lions would do anything, but they just sat in the shade of an acacia tree. For the rest of the day, we drove around, trying to find something to take pictures of. For the rest of the time, the only new animals that we saw were red hartebeeste. When we got to Halali Rest Camp, we ‘nested’ and swam in the big pool before eating dinner and going to the water hole, and only seeing jackels, rhinos, and impala. What made it even more annoying was the fact that the spot lights kept getting turned on and off, so some of the pictures turned out badly.

So, we’re almost to Etosha National Park. It was the biggest game park in the world at 100,000 sq kilometers, but now it isn’t, because it shrank down to only 22,912 sq kilometers. Anyway…we are at Onguma Bush Camp and Eryn and I just swam in their pool, which actually wasn’t that cold. Onguma is situated just outside of Etosha and tonight we’re going to go on a game drive on this side of the big fence.
Later that day:
We went on our game drive, and we were the only ones on it. We got in a big truck that seats eleven passengers and went out the protection gate that keeps the animals out of the campsites and started driving. The first animals that we saw were some zebras that were standing in the middle of the road. Our guide didn’t stop for those, but instead opted for stopping to look at bushbabies. We saw those and moved on, seeing only a bat eared fox and some springbok in the remaining time. It got pretty cold, and Eryn and I pulled on the blankets that were provided. When we got back, we were really tired and went straight to bed.

My post is about skipping stones, well, not all of it, but some of it. If you try to skip a stone the wrong way, it rolls, which would turn it into a Rolling Stone. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to get off topic. Anyway, today I learned how to skip a stone. ‘Where?’ one might ask, ‘When’ another might ask, and another might ask ‘How?’ I will be answering all of those questions, but you have to sit through the whole thing. This is the way of it:

We had gone to the Waterberg National Park, which is a large plateau that is taller than everything around it for a long ways so you can see for miles. We had done that and were back at the guest farm after Eryn and I swam when I finally found the oldest of the three sons of Nadia, the owner’s daughter (or daughter in law.) I found him on the back of a truck with a knife in one hand and a stick in the other. He was whittling and trying to hollow out the center of the stick, and that wasn’t working. Just then, Mark, Nadia’s husband, drove up in his truck and asked us if we wanted to go with him to clean the road grater. We all said yes and climbed into the back of his truck and we drove to the house by the lake and started power washing the grater. We did that for a while and then got invited inside for some Coke and chips. Marsel (the oldest boy) and I took our cokes and went down to the lake. There, he taught me how to skip stones on water. The most that I could ever do was one skip, but he could do four or five. When we came back, we finished our cokes and got back into the truck for the ride back to the farm. When we got back, it was 7:00 PM.

In Namibia, there is a lot of dirt. It’s in the desert, so that’s understandable. Most of the roads are dirt, too. In our past travels here, we have been on the paved roads, and that allowed us to go quickly. Today, however, we drove on dirt.

I’m not sure if I wanted it, or even if I didn’t want it, but it still happened. We drove around on dirt roads for two hours this evening. It was a beautiful day, the sky was blue, the sun was bright, and the clouds were few. All of those things made it a good day. We had been waiting at the front building when Alex drove up in his white truck. He told us to get in the bed of the truck and to stand up so we could see all the animals. At first, we saw none, and even though we looked in every direction, we could not see a single animal. We saw lots of signs that animals had been there, like the bark scratched off the bottom of an acacia tree by a porcupine and several large warthog holes. But it was not to stay that way. The first animals that we say were some klipspringers, which are about the size of a jackrabbit. Then, after driving some more, we saw some hartebeest. Several minutes later, we saw some gemsbok, stopped, took some pictures, and when it left, moved on. Later we saw a rabbit.

Aside from birds, those were the only wildlife that we saw on our drive, though we drove around a lot more. When we got back, we had dinner and went back to our cabins to go to bed.

Weavers Rock is a guest farm in northern Namibia. We are staying here for four nights, and we have already spent one. But since the last time I wrote was in Botswana, I’ll try to catch you up to where we are now.

Yesterday we started out early and went to the Botswana/Namibia Border to get across. We got across and passed through several small towns before arriving in Windhoek, the capitol. In Windhoek, we got sim chips for the phones before heading off again, this time north. After two hours of driving, we arrived at Weavers Rock Guest Farm, and got greeted by Alex, the owner, and his medium sized dog Bonzo. We ate dinner by the pool and when I went to feel the water, I got startled by the light brown giant-of-a-dog, Tasso. He started growling, but after more time, I have come to think that it was snoring. During the rest of dinner, three dogs ran past, two of them stopping. The three dogs were Bonzo, Lille, and Nala. Nala and Lille stopped, and let us pet them. Then we went to our cabins and proceeded to go to bed.

The next day, when we woke up, we had showers and then went outside for breakfast. After that, we went back down towards the pool, and saw the four dogs on the way; Bonzo, Lille, Tasso, and Nala. I played around with them and then found a puppy named Choc, as in chocolate, who is the son of Tasso and a very cute puppy. I played around with those until I found a six year old boy named Dominic. We played around for a while, in the pool and otherwise, before I got forced to go to the water hole. We went, and when we got back, I jumped in the pool a couple of times before giving that up and going in.

Though we aren’t English and don’t drink tea regularly, and weren’t in the company of a president, we nevertheless had a presidential tea time. How we had that, is something that is better told with a back-ground.

On our second full day in Gaborone, we decided to go to the Cresta President Hotel (mentioned in the Number One Ladies Detective Agency) for tea after seeing the sign yesterday that said, on the balcony, Mma Ramotswe Tea Corner. That had caught our eye and we had decided to go. Around three o’clock pm, we left our hotel and started the three minute journey by car the the Cresta President Hotel. Once there, we went upstairs to the resturaunt and got some rooibos (red bush) tea and some chocolate cake to eat and drink. We did that and gazed down at the empty mall below, where, yesterday, there was a formidable array of shops and stalls. But then again, that’s what happens on a Sunday afternoon.

Gaborone isn’t a big city, about 250,000 residents. But still it seems to be a pretty big city. Today we have seen a lot of it, but not all. To tell where we went, I will tell you what we did.

We woke up late this morning and finished breakfast at around 11 o’clock. By noon, we were gone on a drive towards the President Hotel to look around and see the mall behind it. The mall was a large one on a street between other shops. There were lots of wooden products that were carvings and other things like that that were for sale by street vendors. There were even people selling CDs, and to make people notice, they blasted the music out of speakers, and since there were a couple of those, it created a large and uncomely din. Once finished, we went to Zebra Way and looked around, seeing as though that was the closest thing to Zebra Drive, which has a role in the series The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. We did that and then went to Kgali Hill, a hill at the edge of town. After chasing baboons with the car, we looked, but couldn’t find a way to get up the hill, and in the end just gave up and went back to town. In town again, we went to the President’s Office and looked at it, before going back to our hotel. We sat around there and then went to an Indian restaurant called Embassy for supper before going back to our hotel room to go to bed.

The waiting game is a long one. Sometimes people never show up and others keep waiting the rest of their lives, and others people are just gone a really long time. Today I had two examples of the waiting game happen to me; one was at the border crossing between South Africa and Botswana and the other one was waiting for the rental car in the Johannesburg International Airport.

How we got to that airport is probably a mystery for you. Because of that, I will tell the story. Last night we went to the airport in Perth. We waited in the lounge and then boarded a plane towards South Africa. 12 hours later, we were in South Africa. We got some mochas, some sim chips, and then headed toward the Budget Rental Car office on the other side of the airport. They had a car for us, but then decide to give us a taller car. With that upgrade in mind, they worked on it for an hour and twenty minutes, and finally finished and let us get the car. We left.

We drove 5 hours to get to the South African/Botswana border. Once there, we sat around in line for a while on the ZA (South Africa) side before heading over to the Botswana side. The main wait was when we were trying to find money we didn’t have, but eventually just remembered that we had spent it. We changed the number and then drove to Gaborone, where we are now.

Unlike at all the other places that we have been to in Perth, Kings Park had free parking and was very big. We parked and got out at least five times, and all the way through, there was no fee. Anyway, we went to the park around noon. The car entered the park and we went down the road until we reached a playground, where Eryn and I ran off and played. The playground wasn’t like any that I have been to before. It was wooden platforms with ladders and poles off to either side and slides at each end. Not at all what I expected, but still okay. We then moved on and stopped at a lookout and a garden on our way up to another playground, which was a little bit less than we thought it would be. We parked and walked toward the playground. The main part which Eryn and I wanted to use was the Space Net, one of those pyramids made of rope that you could climb. We used that for a little while before we got bored and went off to find other ways to have fun. We found some ziplines (metal, of course) and used those one handed and backwards till we got bored with that and left. Before leaving the park, we did two other things, one of those was a DNA tower that you could climb (it wasn’t that interesting) and a playground, which had a plastic tire swing, and that was about it. Then we left.

It’s hard to believe: 60 hours from now, we will be in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana.

I can’t wait.

Today we went to SciTech. SciTech is a science museum much like the OMSI in Oregon. There were lots of exhibits, from trivia machines to simulated helicopter flying, they had a lot.  When we first entered, Eryn and I went to the trivia machine. It asked questions like ‘what is the largest organ in the body?’ the answer ‘skin’. Then we moved deeper into the area. There was a ball exhibit where you pumped a crank to get a ball to go on a roller coaster-type ride, and there was one where you peddled as fast as you could to see how high you could get a ball. Moving on, there was a simulated helicopter ride, two racing rides, and a soccer (or should I say football??) kick. In one of the racing games, you peddled as fast as you could to move your little icon around the fake track and get to the finish line faster than the other person. In the second racing game, it was like one in an arcade, pedals, steering wheel, and computerized races. On the helicopter ride, you controlled the helicopter around a Google Earth simulated projection with animated cars, trying to do something. Those were probably the most fun of the exhibits, but there were lots of others that probably would have been more fun if we were younger.

We are in Perth. Perth is a big city; not as big as, say, Bangkok, but a whole lot bigger than Eugene. We are now staying in an apartment in Perth and have most of our stuff laid across our rooms. The reason: someone lost two cords, one for the GPS and one for the MP3 player. We unpacked everything, but after all of that, there were no cords to be found. On the bright side, we were able to re-fold everything in our suitcases.

We drove to Perth from Jurien Bay today. It wasn’t too long of a drive, but still, it took a while. When we started to see buildings again, we drove for another 30+ kilometers before turning on a tiny street that only has a street sign on the right side of the road. We went to Coles, afterwards, and bought some food for dinner before eating dinner and arriving where we are now.

Today I will write about animals. There are a lot of animals here, from alpacas to chickens to rabbits. When talking with the owners, Anne and Dennis, we have figured out most of the following about  the domestic animals:

1. Rabbits: There are two rabbits, one is white with brown, and the other is white with black. The black one is named Peter and the brown one is named Mr. Splotch or something like that. In day they can be seen wandering around in their small oval enclosure; either in their bucket or eating grass from the ground. At night they can be found in their pen that looks like it was supposed to be a chicken coop, but it accommodates them anyway. Peter is fairly small and active around his enclosure and has laid back ears (my father commented that everything about them was laid back). Mr. Splotch, however, sits around in one spot with ears off to either side and around his fat head. He is very fat. They both like to be picked up, but only if they feel secure will they not scratch you.
2. Dogs: There are also two dogs, named Millie and Sandy. Millie is an old gray dog (about 12 years old) and sits inside on her pillow most of the day. She isn’t very active most of the time, but when it is very sunny and warm, she will sit out in the grass and lie there until it gets to warm and then go sit on the concrete until she gets to cold and then goes back out to the grass to get warm again. Her fur is light gray and a bit curly in spots and she growls at people if she doesn’t know them. Her tail is very short and doesn’t wag much, if at all. Sandy, on the other hand, is completely different. She is an active 3-year-old dog about Border Collie color and size but is a sheep dog by birth. She has a long attention span and can sit all day in front of the rabbit enclosure watching them move about. I had fun with that early in the day when my sister and father were playing with Peter the rabbit and he was watching them, I stood in front of her face and when she moved her head, I would lean over that way and vice versa. Sandy goes all around the property and is an outside dog, and enjoys that. She is very nice and her long tail thumps hard against your legs when you pet her.
3. Chucks (chickens, pronounced chooks): There are about a dozen chickens in a pen down the road from the homestead. When I went down this morning, there were eight eggs in the nest. The chickens are very active and are great fox bait. Not that Anne and Dennis want them to be. They are all different colors and they are pretty big.
4. Sheep: There are two sheep that hang around with the cattle. Dennis got them for Anne a while back because she likes animals.
5. Alpacas: There are two furry alpacas that follow the sheep and cattle around; they were also from Dennis to Anne a while back. As you can see from this list, she likes animals.
6. Cattle: The station now has about 900 head of cattle on their 7000 acres of land, they used to have more, but they sold them and now predict that it will probably get smaller.

Deceased: Anne said that she used to have geese and turkeys, but they all got eaten by foxes and she doesn’t want to give more food to the foxes, which are considered

The parent’s room is called Lesueur, there is a park named Lesueur, and even a mountain in the park. Everything is called Lesueur after a topographical painter and the the natural history artist on the expedition on the French vessel the Naturaliste. The people on the boat (Frenchmen) decided to name the two prominent hills that they could see from the coast Mt Lesueur and Mt Peron.

Yes, skeletons, on a beach. Some are old, and some are new, but they all have one thing in common, they are dead. Today when we were walking along the beach, we saw bones, and lots of them. Here is how it was (or how I would like to tell it):

After a long day of sitting and playing on the beach, Eryn and I, along with our parents, went back to the station homestead and went to our cabin. Now it came to pass that every night, we have gone out on the beach to walk along the dunes and on the beach. Tonight we did that, but we saw some very different things. At first the walk was like all the other ones, walk down the hill, go through the gate, go down the road, and then climb up the dune. Every other time, we had gone to the right or straight to the beach, but today we went down and to the left. I immediately left them and went and hid in the bushes, moving even with them but staying out of sight. On my side, I saw several deposits of bones but thought nothing about them. Eventually, I ran down the side of the dune and enlisted Eryn as a partner in the business of staying out of sight, and we both crept back out of sight. We did this for some time before the parents turned around while we were resting and startled us. We ran to the first bone deposit that we found and made a skull and cross bones with a skull and crossed bones. We ran some more and when we got to the next one, I took two jawbones and laid them on the beach on a rock, trying to be sure that the parents would see them. Eryn and I had agreed that she would lay another skull and crossbones on the beach at the first deposit of bones that I had found, but when we got there, the bones looked fresh and grisly and Eryn didn’t want to touch them. When we got to the top of the dune, my father ran up behind Eryn and gave her a start before we all got back to the big dune and made way for home.

Today the E&E Exploration Team (EEET for short) built a Lump. At the beginning, when I was building by myself, I just made it a round wall to protect a little hole in the middle against the incoming tide. When Eryn came and started helping, I came up with the idea of filling it in and making a tall tower. Eryn thought that that was stupid, but agreed to do it to humor me. We got it about two feet high and Eryn but a piece of coral on top, but in the onslaught of incoming waves, it fell, along with half of the Lump. Not the lump, thEE Lump. The Lump turned out to be a flop, literally, and most of it fell to the sea, but not before Eryn and I spent a lot of time and energy trying to fix it.

Today we went to the beach. It was called the Gnaraloo Bay and it had warm water. When we first arrived, I saw a whale breaching but no one else believed me. Eryn and I immediately went to the water and dug holes. Well, it was more like I dug a hole and Eryn waded in the water and complained about how cold it was. I dug a small hole and built a small wall around it and then dug a moat complete with its own wall. Eventually, I gave up on the middle part and just focused on another hole in the moat that needed a wall around it. Eryn showed up about then and found herself a hole adjacent to mine and did the same thing. She built a big corner and a tiny wall that kept getting washed out by the incoming tide. After watching mine flood a couple dozen times, I aided Eryn on hers and built up a decent wall. We got bored with that and walked away. 20 minutes later, when we came back, the only part that looked the same was Eryn’s original corner. After bearing Eryn bragging about that, I built a wall that went all the way around the center and dug out the middle. Then we left in the car for Gnaraloo Station.

Gnaraloo, a place of comfort, sheep, and sand. Everywhere you look, there are sheep or there is lots of sand. In the distance, there is the glittering ocean with waves that have sea snakes and poisonous octopi in them, and knowing that there are so many poisonous things around. There are bones everywhere and you can only wonder what brought upon such a death.

Being on in a seaside town has its advantages and disadvantages, and pelicans are in one of the categories, but I don’t know which?

Today we had pelicans involved in our activities, mainly, Pelican Point. Pelican Point is a point out on an island in Shark Bay, west Australia. We could have driven out to the point, but since the car has such low clearance, we probably would have gotten stuck. On the point, there are lots of pelicans and they seem to be okay with humans around them, but I guess that that is from so many people being in the beach and feeding them. On the beach, we walked for awhile before heading back to the car and driving away into the sunset.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t the sunset, but there sure was sun involved.

Animals, animals, so many animals that my father says that I have missed. From emus to lizards he says that I have been oblivious. I haven’t, cause I’m always on the wrong side of the car to see them. The only animals that I have seen are a crow, a goat, three sheep, and an emu. However, this nine hour drive hasn’t been off a waste, for we have gone a long ways up the coast and are still heading for Carnarvan.

Today was a day that had big rocks involved. Mainly, Ayers Rock. Ayers Rock is a big rock out in the middle of nowhere and is very red. People can climb the rock, but today it was closed…too bad. We did two walks today, and luckily for us, they were very short. One of them was a  walk to a waterhole,  which actually had some water in it, and the other one was to another waterhole, but this one was guided. The guide seemed to know a lot, and we walked a ways before the group broke up to leave.

We drove from Alice Springs to Ayres Rock today, and on our way, we saw something interesting. We saw a big cloud and knew that it was a fire but thought that it was just a regular small bush fire away from the road. It wasn’t. When we passed a rest stop, we saw a man shaking his head at us as we passed, we passed more cars with the same response. Finally, when we were almost to the flames, a couple flashed their lights at us and we pulled up and they told us that they had made it through and to just be careful. We took their advise and went through carefully, going fast past the worst bit and using high beams to see through the smoke and haze. All the time that we were in the smoke, Eryn was gripping my arm so hard that afterwards, I said that I would probably have bruises all up and down my arm where she had gripped me so hard.

A didgeridoo is an instrument that is used by Aboriginal Australians.

Wikipedia says that the didgeridoo (also known as a didjeridu or didge) is a wind instrument developed by indigenous Australians of northern Australia around 1,500 years ago and still in widespread use today both in Australia and around the world. It is sometimes described as a natural wooden trumpet or “drone pipe”. Musicologists classify it as a brass aerophone.

Quoted from Wikipedia.

Today I learned how to play a didgeridoo at the Sounds of Starlight Theatre in the Todd Mall. There were lots of didgeridoos and I got to pick which one I got to learn how to play. I choose one that was unpainted but looked regular other then that and then got to ‘toot my own horn’ for a while. Every now and then, the instructor/owner would come over and offer some more tips, which were helpful. In the end, I learned how to play a little bit, but since I don’t have a didgeridoo, I can’t ever use that skill…too bad.

Today we drove to Alice from the Old Ambalindum Homestead. It wasn’t a very long drive, but it took up a while of our day.

We woke up this morning to another clear day…We ate breakfast and got packed, and when we were all done, we left, bidding farewell to Dave as we did so. After a long drive, we arrived at Trephina Gorge, which, quoting my sister, was gorgeous. We took a loop around the rim then got back to the car and left.

Now in Alice Springs, we are staying at somewhere called Kathy’s Place and have eaten and are getting ready to go to bed.

Dave is one of the workers here at the Old Ambalindum Station, and he has some interesting things. He feeds a magpie a lot and it is called ‘Fatso’. On his porch, he has lots of rocks, like rubies and zircon. There were some rocks that were nicely polished and engraved with something that looked like an ‘R’. The interesting thing was, all of these rocks were found on the property. But then again, it isn’t that hard to say that with about 3000 square miles of land in which to look for rocks.

When we were done with that, we went over to the workshop and looked at all the things that he had. There were cow horns that were nice and shiny and smooth that where multi-colored and all polished. He also had some hooves that he was doing the same thing to, and he had one that was partially polished. On one of the boards, he had a skull hanging, and it was a saber-toothed tiger skull. Not really, though, it was a horse skull backwards with cow horns glued on either side of the neck bone.

In the heat of the day in Australia, life seems to move at a slower pace. Despite a few trials, such as snakes, dehydration, and fights among my men, I have been enjoying myself in Australia immensely. I can only hope my men benefit from it as much as I. Each day, I see everyone start to relax a bit more, even in the fear of Aboriginal people attacking; which I think a silly fear… everyone we have met on this journey has been of the friendly sort, not the attacking, contrary to my men’s imagined Australians… the nature is beautiful. There is a whole moon tonight and the sunset was magnificent. The animals are bountiful: kangaroos and wallabys and lizards and brightly-colored birds abound… it is so pleasant here that, had I my family and childhood friends with me, I would undoubtedly stay for the remainder of my life.

Extracted from A Record of My Experience in the Great Land; Australia by Geoffrey Allen Reid

That excerpt from Reid’s book is in relation to what happened today. After a relaxing sleep of about ten-and-a-half hours, I woke up to the beautiful light streaming in through the crack in my window shade.  I got up and went to breakfast before going out and looking around the Old Ambalindum Homestead premises and learning about the shearing shed and the Bushcamp, which are old dormitories that people stayed in a while ago. After that, my dad went outside and went on a walk to the Ambalindum Lake, which actually held water, though it is the dry season and on his way back saw a kangaroo. When he came back, we went in the car up to the lookout, and though we couldn’t see the station, it was a magnificent view. On the way back, we kept our eyes peeled for any sign of wildlife, but all we saw was little green budgies in flocks of thousands.  When we arrived at the station, we found that a TV crew was there and that they were filming an ad for the homestead and that they wanted us in it. Since then, we have watched horses come galloping in to the yard, damper (bread) getting cooked on the campfire, and marshmallows getting roasted (by Eryn and I). And all of it was on camera.

The Old Ambalindum Homestead is a cattle station out in the bush north-east of Alice Springs. We got there this evening after a full day’s drive from Tennant Creek, which is on the highway from Darwin to Alice Springs.

On the way, we stopped at Devil’s Marbles, a site where there are lots of round rocks. We saw a brown snake, but it moved away. In one cluster of rocks, there is a base rock that has three big rocks on top of it and a little room around those rocks on the shelf of rock. My father and I found a way to get to the other side of the rock by going through a crack that looks like it dead-ends but actually, it turns and goes to the other side. When we were done with that, we kept driving for a long time, stopping only to get fuel for the car until Alice Springs.

In Alice Springs, we went to a Woolworths and got some food for the rest of the week because the Homestead is self-contained and the closest town (Alice Springs) is a two hour drive away. After the long drive, we had luckily not seen any kangaroos in our headlights, and we arrived safe and sound (but a bit jostled) at the Old Ambalindum Homestead.

Today I shall tell you what we did today and how we came to be in all three cities.

We started out this morning at around 7:20 am and left our apartment and started on a long day of driving. At first we were all looking around, eyes wide in excitement for being on the road and looking for kangaroos. We passed a couple of dead ones before Mother finally said that she had seen one, but it was too late to go back so we kept going past the corpses that were practically piled up on the side of the road. Since it was more boring than expected, I went to sleep. I was only asleep about half an hour but almost as soon as I got up I saw a kangaroo.

Those were the only two kangaroos which we saw alive today, but we saw lots of dead ones, from empty brown skins to full kangaroos that seemed like they had just been hit. Mother said that she saw some cows, and since she is a truthful mother, we have to take her word for it. We passed through lots of towns, but the only ones we stopped at were Katherine and Elliot to get fuel for the car.

Now we are in Tennant Creek in the Eldorado Motel and are getting ready for bed.

Today we went to a spring out in the Australian Bush and swam around, doing something that goes along with the following:

When we got to the springs, we went up to the top pool (about 3.5 feet deep) and got used to the water for a while before going downstream to the main pool (very deep) where we just swam across and went down a little creek to the next pool, which was deserted. But then when we came, lots of other people came but it still wasn’t crowded.

I humored myself be going off a little ledge and going down feet first to the bottom but it wasn’t that deep so it was easy. Then we went downstream. It is a fairly large river by then and you have to swim or find a rock to stand on out in the middle, where it is very deep.

When we were headed back upstream, I found a rock and tried to get to the bottom but it was too deep and even after five tries, I still couldn’t make it and just kept going upstream until we reached our stuff at the first pool.

Tonight, I got a bike out and rode it around the beach area around our apartment. I rode for a long ways one way and turned off on a bumpy road. Then I turned around and turned right and went across a bridge to the other side of the stream. The bridge was yellow and very narrow so I went slowly as to not crash into people. On the far side of the bridge, there was a road leading of into the Federal Reserve of Nightcliff or something like that and I didn’t want to go there so I turned around and went back over the bridge. On the other side of the bridge, I passed playgrounds and water fountains while heading back to the picnic table where everyone else was having dinner. When I had finished with my dinner, I went the other way through the parks and got to a point before going back to the picnic table. When I got back, I found out that the table was deserted but luckily found my father a little ways away and went with him across the street.

is one of the names for the Crocosaurus Park in Darwin. In that park, there are lots of things, from crocs to snakes, to sting rays. We saw all of them and enjoyed it, so I’ll go into the details:

There are at least 6 fully grown crocs, 5 male, 1 female. There are also hundreds of babies and you can fish for them with pieces of meat (and let them go. I did that) or just look at them through glass or hold them and get your picture taken. One of the things that you could also do was take the cage of death, a round cylinder that they lowered into crocodile water. We didn’t do it because it was over a hundred dollars per person. There is also a reptile farm and we got to see them feed an olive python and then I got to hold another python and some lizards. In one of the corners, there was a glass square that had a metal crocodile mouth in it and it chomped down to show how powerful the bite was on just a block of ice. In the shop, there were lots of expensive items, like whole crocodile skins or crocodile wallets. All in all, I think we had a good time at the Crocasaurus Park.

Have you ever been out on a beach at sunset, feeling the sand slide beteween your bare feet? It feels nice, and I know that lots of people have felt it and enjoy it. My story will start out when a family left home after supper. There were four of them and their names were Eryn, Ethan, Susan, and Jerry.

They left their apartment a little bit after 6:30 pm and where on the beach a few minutes later. After wading across a small creek, Eryn kicked off her sandals and called out to Ethan, “I’ll race you to the ocean!” and they took off, leaving their parents, Jerry and Susan behind. When they got to the ocean, Ethan tried his hand at telling a story about how feet came to be, about a giant foot who went around (by flying, of course) giving people the wisdom of the foot. The result didn’t turn out to well and he went off, abashed by Eryn laughing at his efforts. Susan and Jerry walked around before also heading away from the ocean and back to the park and from there back to the apartment.

A day in Darwin sounds more appropriate, but you can’t be too picky, so I will leave it at that for now.

Okay, so, today we woke up. If you can call it that; more like I got jolted into counciousness when I heard my mother and Eryn conversing in hushed (loud) voices. I immediately was up and started reading (rereading to be exact) the Magician’s Nephew, until later when I took a shower and got dressed. We had breakfast and then went to the Defense of Darwin war museum, which was very interesting. There is a theatre with a multimedia experiance where I sat and watched and listened while the stroble lights flashed, the speakers boomed machine gun noises, and planes flew across the screen bombing a small Darwin. It was kind of sad though, listening to all of the stories that they had recorded and you could see where those people were on a big screen.

Then we went to the Leanyer Recreational Park (run by the YMCA) and Eryn and I had fun having water dumped on us while the parents sat in the shade. There was a big pool, two long body slides, one long, dark, inner-tube slide (for two people at a time), and a playground that had a bucket that dumped on people below. We had fun and got wet.

Yesterday, when I didn’t write a post, we went to the mountains. We boarded a train around 11:22 and rode for one hour and forty-eight minutes before arriving in the Blue Mountain town of Katoomba. We got there and walked down the street to the shop called the Hattery, which sells hats. In that shop, there are hundreds of Akubra hats, lining the walls of the building. Surprisingly, there weren’t that many customers and I was the only one trying on Akubras for most of the time. In the end, I got an olive green ‘Tablelands’ hat, with a wide brim and a kangaroo leather strap.

When we finished with that, we went to a French bread shop and a ‘Go-Lo’ shop to get food and water for the day before heading down the street to Echo Point. At Echo Point, we had our snacks and looked over the edge. It was a very long ways down. Once finished, we went down a path and crossed on a wooden bride a span between to rocks of about ten feet. That wasn’t very interesting and we left after taking some pictures of me in my new hat.

I know that probably you are shifting around in your seats, trying to telepathically go into the past and tell me to hurry up and get to Darwin, so I will.

After waking up this morning after our last night at Andre and Sabrina’s guesthouse, we went to the airport and waited for our plane. When we got on our plane, we sat down and started reading to pass the time while the plane taxied around for what seemed like hours before taking off.

Once in Darwin, we proceeded immediately to the Hertz rental car place and got our car and went to our apartment. There, we put our stuff down before immediately heading off for a supermarket, where we bought ice cream and the other necessities of life. Then we had a supper of pasta, broccoli, salad, and some ice cream and did our own things.

Yes, my post is about playgrounds.

Eryn and I have played on many playgrounds this trip, and here are some of them and a description:

Park in the Olympic Grounds: A big park on the riverside, this park offers everything from rope webs to wooden towers to swings. You can take a zipline or try your balance on the round balance beam. And since those are just a few of the things, you’re bound to find something that you like.

Park at Watsons Bay: This park is small and so is the amount of equipment, but some of them are very fun. There is a seesaw that spins and goes really high and some monkey bars that are curved upwards.

Other Park in the Olympic Grounds: This one was more like a jungle gym, but is still fun. There are lots of bars to climb and slide down. There is also a ‘climbing wall’ that kids can climb on.

Also, at our house, there is no electric heating and it gets down to 55 degrees farhanheit. Luckily, however, there is a wood stove that heats up the whole living room.

Luna Park, a place of fun, dizziness, and music.

We went to Luna Park today and we all had fun. After waiting for about half an hour while my father bought Eryn and I unlimited tickets for the whole park. Eryn and I went on the ferris wheel before I had to go back to the counter to get a new entrence  pass because the old one was too loose. Then we went on to the Tango Train, a really fast wheel with cars on the end.

While riding and getting squished I thought there was music like We Will Rock You.

When we were done with that, we went to the Wild Mouse, a really fast roller coaster that is kind of because you go straight towards the ocean edge and then abruptly turn off to the right before doing that again and again.

After that, Eryn and I went to Coney Island. Coney Island is a large building that houses  twelve different things that you can do, seven of them just being different slides that all look the same. There is also a maze of mirrors that is just boring and a couple of moving walkways that go in circles. There are also two circles that go around in different directions. Then there is a place with moving boards underfoot and you have to try to get across. Then there is a spinning thing, people sit in the center and try to stay on the middle as long as they can while the circle is spinning quickly.

Later, I went on three different rides that spun around called the Music Ride, the Moon Ranger, and the Flying Saucer.

Public transport, trains, ferries, buses.

We needed those things today, but instead of using them, Eryn and I decided to walk (and drag my mother along too) to a ferry wharf that was a long ways away from where we wanted to be, a big park. When we got to that wharf, we called father to see where he was and it turned out that he was where we had wanted to go and he wanted us to join him there. We saw a sign that said ‘Park: 2700 meters’ and walked for 2.7 kilometers.

What we now wish we had known was that where we wanted to go actually wasn’t that far, but we thought that it was closer to the wharf than it was and went the wrong way. On the way back, we rode a bus that took us right where we needed to be, when we needed to be.

However, nobody died or anything like that so I thought that it was a good waste of time.

Yes, that’s what we are doing now in Sydney, Australia. We are loving being in a place that doesn’t have cow poo everywhere and you have to watch where you step every second of the day.

Yes, kite.

Today we came on the train into Old Delhi to see: kites!!! Lots of these colorful flying pieces of paper adorned the bright blue sky as children gathered below to control the kites. Many a time, we saw kites on the ground, broken and useless. Yet still their little owners found ways to be happy on this year’s Independence Day, celebrating the 65th year of independence.

The Indian people use kite flying to show how they feel about their independence from Britain. Most people have kites and they use them in games to cut one another’s string and for contests of duration and height.

Today was our last day in Jaisalmer, and we spent it staying around home and doing work (reading and schoolwork). We went on a shopping trip (we being Eryn, my mother, and I) to use up my money and for Eryn to look at patchwork things. The first shop that we went to didn’t have much, but the second shop was more interesting to Eryn, as she saw a pillow case that she liked. We walked down the street to a small table that had miniature auto rickshaws-tuk-tuks- (Eryn: ‘CUTE!’) and small elephants. I bought an elephant and something else while Eryn bought nothing. We went back to Bobbi’s place to look at pillow covers before heading back to the second place to get the pillow cover that Eryn liked at the beginning. I went on another motorcycle ride with Raj before heading back to the hotel in the middle of a storm. Now, there is water in the streets and people are happy for more rain.

We went to a mansion today and it was made of stone. It had lots of stone. And lots of bats. And lots of guano, too.

Despite all of that, it was a cool (by which I mean hot) house, with at least four floors and a rooftop with towers jutting out. Eryn and I spent most of our time on the towers watching the parents go around and around on the lower levels, and when the reached the top, we went down. We did that for a while before going to the next house over and discoving that it was the one that was so important, because it actually had no bats and someone who cleaned it. I liked the other one better. At the second one we went up and down the stairs, looking at the exhibits of locks and musical intruments before going to the resturaunt at the bottom of the stairs. While there, we got some cool drinks before heading back towards the hotel.

Tea, a drink with Jam and Bread

Yes, my post is about tea. Today I will tell you how to read tea leaves to tell your fortune. Actually, I’m not. I’m going to tell you what happened in a poem.
Here it goes:

Mom put the teapot over cup,
She pressed the handle and tea went up.
It sprayed all over clothes and the floor,
And then breakfast wasn’t such a bore.

We sat silently, numb with shock,
and then began to laugh and talk.
The waiter asked if he could help,
Right as Mother began to yelp.

The tea had burned Mom on the arm,
But for us, the tea did no harm.
The tea then poured so easily,
What was lost was very measly.

I said it would be in this post,
and then the waiters came with toast.
Eryn’s toast had lots of gold honey,
But to me, it was too runny.

was one of my questions last night on our camel safari. There were five guides, but none of them drank anything. You’re probably wondering if I’m going to talk about anything but beer, and the answer is yes.

Yesterday, I went on a ride with Raj on his motorcycle around the fort. First, we went to the gate and had glasses of fresh juice. Then, we went around the city for about ten minutes before heading up to the main square, where we drank chai and talked with some of Raj’s friends. When we were finished with our cups, we got back on his motorcycle and went down the street. After a brief stop at the hotel, we continued our ride down to a Nokia phone shop, where we talked to some more of Raj’s friends. When we were finished there, we went to the fort and drove around before going back to the square for more chai and a passenger to take to the train station. We were there for a little bit before going back to the hotel for the final time.

Now for the camel ride. We left around two o’clock and rode in a jeep for about two hours to get to a village. At the village, we had a cup (or bowl) of chai tea before getting on our camels and riding off into the sunset. We rode for about one hour before getting to camp on the dunes. We all played around on the dunes a bit before supper was prepared on a fire. It was Indian food cooked to perfection with a little bit of smoke flavor. We looked at the stars for a while before lying down. But sleep would come to none of us. Finally, at about midnight, I drifted off and awoke the next morning covered in sand. We had breakfast and mounted our camels for a long ride.

After about two hours, we were finished and said goodbye to the guides (one of them was eleven) before riding off in a jeep.

Yes, we found a French bakery, but as you can see from the title, there are no French bakers. More of that later, though. Yesterday I had ended my post with an explanation of the hotel in which we are staying. Now, I will try to give a summary of what happened today, with the interesting bits left in.

We woke up (early, early, early) at 7:30 am to go to breakfast while it was still cool. Again, I ordered something with so-called chocolate (a banana-chocolate pancake), which always turns out to taste like hot chocolate mix mixed with milk. We ordered a cup of tea and drank most of it before heading down so we could leave in the next hour. When we headed out (finally) we had in mind to go and visit two temples and a palace. But then again, days don’t always go the way they are planned.

We went to two temples and then walked down the street a little ways until we saw a sign that said boulangerie. We went down that side street and met a cook who said the restaurant was at the top of the building. We went up there and got some cool drinks and heard that the French chef was out because of his paternal leave. The cook also said that he likes Obama, and that our president was communist because he cared a lot about the country and not that much about the people. We left, went to two more temples and went back to the hotel. At the hotel, I did my schoolwork and went up with my father to the to the outside restaurant on the top floor to see if Raj was there to talk about the camel riding. When we got up we saw that all the cushions were set away in the alcove. We looked to see approaching rain clouds, the first in about a year. The rain started softly, but by the time we had gotten down to our rooms to get the cushions off of our balconies, it was pouring with very fast winds.

My room was almost soaked and I finally got a towel at the bottom of the window to stop the worst leak. The rain continued for about 10 minutes and then settled down to a steady sprinkle. We went up to the top and drank tea with Raj before we headed down to buy clothes for the desert tomorrow.

For supper tonight, we went to the same place that we had the cool drinks at noon. Most of the time we were waiting for our food, Eryn was trying to take pictures of lightning. It didn’t work too well.

Despite what the title said, we did not have donuts today, but the day did go on, and it was also a down day. It was a warmish day today and we spent most of it outside in the shade of the hanging swing, reading and writing to catch up with all of our emails and pictures. The Internet was down (again) but my father got it to work just long enough so that we have tickets to get home on June 19, 2013. Home being Seattle, but it’s at least on the right side (or is it left?) of the continent. Nonetheless, it is good to know that we are going home, as up until now, we didn’t know if or when we were coming back. Knowing that, it puts an even brighter look on the future of this trip.

Yes, that’s right, we finally arrived in Jodphur today. By train, of course. Our new place is a little ways outside of town. It is called the Mandore Guesthouse and it has 16 roundavels, most of the, with private balconies. We got two of those, and we spent the rest of the day lounging around outside in the late afternoon sun. There are lots of trees and places to sit in the lawn, and it is all very nice. No pool, though.

We had an Indian (obviously) supper and ate till we were full, and then washed it down with tankards of banana lassie. It was good and I think we all enjoyed it.