Singing in the rain

*warning* this post may cause jealousy when you live in the Netherlands (or another country where it is currently raining or freezing)

I know it’s probably around 10 degrees in the Netherlands (I even hear they predict temperatures below zero at night) but I’m still going to say it: it has been cold here! Well I shouldn’t overreact, it has been around 19 degrees at night, but still it’s a nice change from the 36 degrees we had to suffer through last week. We’ve even had rain, Martijn and I were still out feeding the horses and were drenched in under a minute. It’s funny how quickly you get used to the higher temperatures. For the first couple of weeks I’ve been wondering why on earth I even brought a pair of jeans but now everyone is wearing jumpers and jackets in the evenings and I’m actually sleeping under a duvet instead of just a sheet. You see how hard our life is here ;)

More proof of how busy we are: on Tuesday we went to the beach near St. Lucia. It was a bit ‘cooler’ (but still around 25 degrees) so it was nice and quiet. The water was a bit cold though, plus there’s always the risk of getting eaten by sharks (or hippos or crocodiles) so I didn’t actually swim but it was nice to sunbathe for a bit. We decided to include sunbathing for 40 minutes in our daily schedule from then on (it hasn’t happened yet). On the way back we took a shortcut through a reserve belonging to a five star lodge and were lucky enought to find a (five star) lioness in the middle of the road. We didn’t even see her at first as we were all looking at the car behind us. When Martijn said there was a lion in front of us we thought he was joking, we almost ran her over. When we were watching her, a male lion came walking up to the nearby fence, later followed by a second one. They were roaring at each other, it was really cool.

We spend another afternoon at Eric and Gina’s. Nathan took Mikaela and me to shoot the pallet gun. I had done it before but I’m not a very good shot. Imagine my surprise when my first three shots all hit their marks (a tin can 150 metres away). According to Nathan the gun was skew (he kept missing the cans). We were so focussed on the shooting we didn’t realize Martijn and Eric lit some fireworks behind us, my ears were ringing all night.

Yesterday, Yvette, Rick, Wesley and I went to the Hluhluwe Park in another attempt to find a leopard (or wild dogs, I still haven’t seen them in the wild). Unfortunately the ‘interesting’ animals seemed to be on strike. We saw a lot of zebra, nyala, warthog, waterbuck, buffalos and a rhino but that was it. Funny how easy it is to forget how amazing it actually is to get to see this. We are spoiled with all the rhino in the park and we consider the buffalo the impalas of the big five (you see them everywhere).

I know it sounds like we’re nog doing anything here but we actually do work. I got up at 5.30am three days in a row to get the horses ready for rides. We have had rides every day for the last week and a half and I even guided two myself because our guide was off. I was a bit nervous about that as I don’t know a lot about the park, plants and animals but I think I did alright. I hope the stories I told were actually true and not me mixing up all the facts and making up new trees and animals that don’t actually exists. Ah well, the guests had fun and they were all really nice. At least we didn’t get lost.