In Transit

January 23: Today is the day we finally head to Chicago!!! We had an early morning breakfast at Waveland Café and hit the road!

January 24: My first flight left at 4:25 and was headed to Amsterdam! It was a nice flight with no exciting and crazy things to share. One of the COOLEST things I have observed so far and really lets me know I'm made to travel is the fact that there have been hardly any English speaking people around me today! It's so neat. Everything announced on both of my flights today were first on Dutch and then in English. Something Americans take for granted! It's a small observation but I think its a pretty rad realization anyway!

January 25:After about a 4 hour layover in Amsterdam and an 11 hour flight, I arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa around 10PM today. It's a little rainy here so the landing was a little rough but I'm here safely! The airport is kind of confusing but good think I have an 8 hour layover to hopefully get it figured out! I only get 30 minutes of free wi-fi so I suppose it's a good thing I brought so many books with me!

January 26: I finally... FINALLY arrived in Port Elizabeth around 8AM my time. There was another girl flying in that day as well that I had to wait for so I hung out at the airport until 2ish. We were finally brought to Kariega Game Reserve where we met out volunteer coordinator, Frances, and our roommates. I am currently living with one other from the states, two from the UK, one from Germany, two from Denmark, one from Australia, and one from Iceland! I've already gotten used to only hearing things in an accent. (It won't be any fun when I'm home and everyone talks just like me. ;) ).

Once we met everyone, we got in our cruiser and headed to our house. Our cruiser is what we take everywhere we go on the reserve. It seats 11 people and has no windows or roof. We are living in a house literally in the middle of the reserve with only dirt roads leading to it. Our house is 3 bedrooms and 2 baths with a small pool out back. (Don't worry... there's a large fence up all the way around our house and yard.)

So the reserve is split into two: Kariega West (KW) and Kariega East (KE). KE is where the general public stays. There are nice lodges, a pool, and spa for people to come here on vacation or on their honeymoon! KE has all of the more endangered species on it like giraffe, rhino, hippo, kudu, ostrich, impala, zebra, etc. KW is where we live. This is the predators side of the reserve so we have elephants, lions, leopards, and of course some zebra and kudu to help the food chain along.

On January 27, we went out on our first game drive. This is where we literally go out and watch animals. It's so cool because they're just in their natural habitat and completely wild. There are absolutely no boundaries between us and them. We drive on roads that are not maintained and sometimes completely surrounded by trees. We were on a road completely surrounded by trees and came up on a huge giraffe bull in the middle of the road. We just got to sit and watch him until he was ready to move along since there was no way for us to get around him. Oh, and did I mention it was raining at this point? Because the roads are so rough and none are a direct shot anywhere, it takes about a half an hour to get from where we were back to our house on the other side so we were drenched when we got back to our house for lunch.

Frances gave us that afternoon off since it rained all afternoon so we just hung out until evening. We live about 15-20 minutes from a small town called Kenton-On-Sea where we went to get groceries and have burgers. They have a special where you can get a burger, fries and onion rings for R29. (That's less than 3 US Dollars!) Everything here is insanely cheap!

It's still crazy to me that I am actually here. It's the coolest thing falling asleep to the sounds of Africa. They have different kinds of birds and we can always hear monkeys too. We actually have to close our windows every day when we leave as they have no screens and the monkeys could get in and make a real mess of the place!

I've been having some issues with my camera so no pictures yet but I think I got it fixed so they should be coming soon!

Until next time!