You're Full of Rubbish, Amarullah!

Game Drive 2--Monday Morning

After a satisfying night of no sleep, as we stood in the middle of our beds ready to go biblical on any spiders, stinging velvet ants or scorpions, we were "awoken" by the darling James at five am. We had 15 minutes to gear up, that is, put on clean clothes and eye liner, grab the camera and go to meet our group for the morning game drive. The same folks were there, the two South Africans, the Welsh folks, and Veruca Salt and her Dad (We're still not 100% sure about this relationship. He could also be her husband or man servant). Everyone but we Americans referred to the jeep as a "bus", which is stupid. No, I'm not being culturally insensitive, it's a jeep.

Off into the wilderness. First we saw a warthog. YAWN. Warthogs are butt-hideous, and we didn't trek all the way to Africa to see ugly-ass animals. Bring on the cute ones! Veruca shared her in-depth knowledge about Warthogs with us (probably gleaned from the Lion King), and even the Warthog got bored and took off. Also, he may have been insulted because at first James identified him as a pregnant female, and then said "Oops, that's a male". No one likes being mistaken as pregnant, and this is doubly true for dudes.

After the warthog, we saw some elephants wandering up a hill, and then, Yay! Giraffes! I was hoping I'd see Lisa P, but she's still in "the States", which is where everyone says we're from. The giraffes were totally awesome, super cute, and we even saw some running which was hilarious, and I don't think James appreciated mine and Lizzie's peals of laughter. We learned many Giraffe fun facts, but the one I will share is this:

Because of their massive height, giraffes have a pretty wide and intense dung splatter pattern. Their dung is also small and black, in case you were wondering, and you know you were. After much enjoyable giraffing, we saw some spring buck, impalas (not the car, as Lizzie noted), wildebeasties, and then a giraffe being chased by two young male sub-adult lions. We watched them from far away, but then James kicked the Jeep into high gear, and we made it to the other side of the velde in time to see the cautious giraffe shake the lions, who grumpily crossed in front of us. We would've offered them Veruca Salt, but they said they were on a low sodium diet, and hated British food.

After the lions, we saw baby warthogs (still ugly) hanging out in a field of crows. One crow jumped on one baby's back, knocking him over, then the other. Oh, nature.

We passed some zebra (pronounced with a short "e") and I got a shot of one majestically kicking its feet into the air, but then James had to ruin it by saying they did this to help move the gas caused by their multi-chambered digestive process. So I got a majestic shot of a majestically farting zebra. Rad.

And now, Amarullah. We were driving back toward the lodge for breakfast (oh god who gets up this early?) and ran into a back up of jeeps and a few private vehicles. James pulled us up to the front, next to a family in a white mini-van, and there ahead of us was Amarullah, the musting elephant, dripping testosterone willy nilly (if you will). So James said "Amarullah! You're full of rubbish." At first we thought he meant crap, because we'd seen our share of that, but no, he meant that Amarullah was being a bit of a trouble maker, as the elephant was lumbering in the middle of the narrow road, flaring his ears. James kept backing us up to put distance between us and the rubbish-filled elephant, but then the mini-van got in our way, so Amarullah charged us. James drove us off the road and around the van, which, to our collective disappointment, was not severely tusked. The stink was unbelievable, though, that of the musting elephant, but hey, after nearly killing us, he felt better and got out of our way so we could eat. Yeah.

N.B. The staff here delights in coming up with inventive names for the critters. We didn't ask about Amarullah, but they have another overly aggressive bull elephant named Steroid, and when one of their black Rhino males beat up a female, they named him Ike. Aww, how sweet.