Here's a slideshow from Africa

I'm back in Chicago! It only took about 38 hours of travel time to get home though. I've taken a first shot at some of the highlights of the safari and handful of shots from Mauritius.

|| Click here to see the slideshow ||

Hello from Mauritius

It's been raining on and off today in Mauritius, so we decided to hit up the local internet cafe at le meridien.

The safari we went on last week in South Africa was unbelievable. There's really nothing like being 3 feet from a lion or an elephant and having them look at you face to face. All of the animals were suprisingly calm and didn't mind when we came close to them. We saw pretty much everything we wanted to see. All of the "Big Five" which are lion, leopard, water bufallo, rhino and elephant. We also saw about 40 other animals and more than 25 types of birds. Here are some of the highlights of the trip -

> Listening to a male lion roar at about 5 feet away (the sound is unreal)
> Waking up to a male elephant drinking out of the pool in the back of our villa
> Tracking down a male leopard who was trying to "get busy" with a female leopard
> I was attacked by a bat on the way back from one of our drives and had to fling him off my coat

I took about 1,500 pictures from the entire safari and I can't wait to post some of them, but I can't upload them on this computer. So stay tuned next week sometime...

Hope everyone is doing well.

Steve

We've landed in South Africa!

Hi Everyone....

Just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that we arrived in South Africa safely a few hours ago. We are in Johannesburg for the night at the InterContinental and then it is back on an airplane tomorrow morning for the Safari. The flight was long, but not as bad as anticipated, there were quite a number or meals and entertainment to keep us busy. I can't connect my camera to the computer I'm using so unfortuately no pictures for now.

Take care.