URT: Port Elizabeth

13 November

So we never actually saw much of Port Elizabeth, much more than what you can see driving through it. From, what I saw and what I was told, it is just another boring beach town. An industrial beach town, which means it isn't even pretty. We stayed at a hostel called The Hippo, which was great-- and had free toast and tea!

But we didn't go to Port Elizabeth to see Port Elizabeth, we went there to spend the night so we could go to Addo Elephant Park and Schotia Game Reserve. That's right, we had a safari day! It was a very full day and I enjoyed every bit of it... and love the pictures that I took!
I saw many animals... to put it in a way that Disney lovers would understand, I saw Mufasa and Nala and Simba and Rafiki and Puumba! Awesome!

We started our morning at Addo Elephant Park, a place that was originally created to keep the elephants from eating the local farmers' oranges and to keep the local farmers from killing the elephants for eating their oranges. Since then the elephants have multiplied and I loved seeing them upclose! They are Addo elephants, so slighly smaller and redder than other elephants. When looking at the pictures, don't think that their skin was peeling off [as far as I know elephants don't molt], but they have dried mud all over them because they love to play in the mud and use it to cool off on hot days! We saw some baby elephants, including one that was only a few days old. Awesome. So cute.

It was during this trip that I realized the DSLR [the bigger camera] that I have is only as good as its zoom lens. Someone would say "look over there!" We'd all take pictures. Mine would come out as a small speck, but apparently it was a lion or something. I would look at Marita's, who has something like a 200mm zoom [mine is the 55mm basic that came with the camera] and you could actually see a lion. So now I know what I am saving my money for [in a few years, these things are expensive]! The guy driving us around the park kept making fun of me for it... even my smaller handheld camera has 3x the zoom than this one. I guess you give up something for better picture quality! [A few of the pictures on the blog today I stole from Marita. I don't want to take credit that is hers! She is a fantastic photographer.]

We then went to Schotia, a private game reserve that is about 10% the size of Addo but with a much more diverse population of animals. We ate a wonderful and delicious lunch there, we had tea time there, we even ate an amazing dinner [that included stewed Springbok] there! They treated us well, and showed us some animals in between. Over the course of the day we saw 4 of the South Africa's "Big Five": Rhino, Buffalo, Lion, and Elephant [there was no Leopard to be seen].

I took so many pictures, especially of the elephants... I couldn't help it! I have never been that close before.