Animals!!!

Alrighty everyone - this is what you've all been waiting for! At least this is what I've been waiting for. Game drives and pictures of lots of animals!! I'm so excited - we were in Etosha National Park in Namibia for 2 days and went on some game drives and saw really cool things! I also took some videos, but they are apparently all 65 MB and not dealing well on YouTube. I'll upload them back in the States. Anyways, so at Etosha, we stayed at this campsite that had a watering hole - and what's cool about the winter is that it is dry and the animals seek out the watering hole throughout the day and we just sit there and watch them. We saw and heard a lot of great things - elephants, rhinos, and lions roaring, but not approaching the watering hole. So on to the pictures:

Giraffes! I don't think I really need to explain, much, right? You guys just want to see the pics, no?


This elephant is by our watering hole - there's another picture further down by our watering hole, but I uploaded them out of order - sorry.
Zebras! There were lots of zebras, I actually got a little zebra'd out.

Zebras mingling with some Oryx - their horns were super long and sharp. They can actually pierce through lions and throw them.
Zebras hanging out with the wildebeast. Wildebeest. I don't know how to spell it.
Elephants! Look at the baby elephant!
And here are the elephants again at our watering hole - near sunset.
This is a little far away - but it's a rhino! Actually 2. or 3. Anyways, we saw more rhinos at night at our watering hole, but it was dark and my pictures never came out. Sorry.

And finally - LIONS!!! We saw lions! I was so excited, actually our entire bus was super excited. Here is a male lion, he was prowling around the watering hole (a different one) and got lazy and just lied down. It must have been too hot for him. The female lions are the ones that hunt anyways, so the males can just laze around - typical.

And here is another male too - we thought it was a female because of the lack of a mane, but our guide said that it's just a young male and you can tell (through binoculars) that he has a small mane growing.
But here is the young male lion across the watering hole from a giraffe - I think the giraffe got a little freaked out.
So that's all the pictures that I am going to upload. That should capture the past two days. We are in Windhoek right now, the capital of Namibia - just for the night, and tomorrow we go to Botswana! We're going to the Okavango Delta on Thursday and Friday - where we do some "game drives" in a dugout canoe - so more of a hippo and crocodile type of drive - I am excited for that one! Although there's supposed to be a lot of mosquitos too, I am going to have to sleep with my mosquito net - another key purchase apparently. Gotta love REI. After that, we go to Chobe National Park for more game drives - not sure what other animals we are going to see. But so far, we've seen 3 out of the Big Five - Lion, Elephant and Rhino. The remaining 2 are Water Buffalo and Leopard. Hopefully I can see those two before the end of my Africa trip. And then we go to Zambia - for Victoria Falls. And this group overland trip that I am on ends on June 6. I am not sure what Internet will be like in Botswana, so I might be without an update until we reach Livingstone in Zambia - which will be June 4.

Until next time everyone!