Going for it!: week 4- Edeni (animals!)

So right now i'm in a hostel in johannesburg (joburg) that's SUPER close to the airport but not much else. Its not the nicest place but its very safe and the owner very nice and there's FREE internet so here goes!
So our group left Cape Town and went to Edeni, a private game reserve east of joburg, almost to Kruger National Park- VERY nice accomodations! the "tents" had running water haha and if you sat on your porch for a while you'd see (or at least hear- sometimes even more fun!) a decent amount of wildlife!
i could go through every detail of each day cus every day/drive was AWESOME but here's the cliff notes version- animals: we saw lions, giraffes, zebras, wart hogs, dassies, at least 5 different species of deer-like animals ending in -bok, a couple cheetahs, hippos, nile crockidiles, cape buffalo, elephants, termites and their mounds, heyenas, stripped mice, rhinos, wild dogs, baboons and another monkey-like species, and apparently over 90 species of birds, only about 1/3 of which i documented haha...... anyway so my favorite was probably a cheetah that we saw just chillin next to the road- actually, the driver and the tracker both missed it and I, yes, I spotted it and started saying "CHEETAH!!!" a million times but i was in the back row so it took us a while to stop and start rolling backwards again (SCARY!) but the cheetah didnt mind and was just chillin about 10 meters away! i was SO stoked!
other animal highlights- at Kruger, we came upon our first lion at the time- a lioness hunting! although the impala came REALLY close to here, we spent an entire hour listening to our guide, Andrew, get SUPER excited and curse about the South Africans who screwed everything up-i'd quote him, but we'll keep this at least PG-13....but the lioness never pounced! aaaaaack! o well, it was SUPER fun anyway! another favorite was our last night drive, when we came accross most of the park's pack of elephants. we had known since the first drive how destructive they are, and how overpopulated Kruger is and how much of a problem their tree-falling tendencies are...but we got to watch them very close to us for a while and even watched one fall a small tree- and i got a video of it! woot!!!! we also got to have sundowners (we had tea/coffee breaks on our morning drives and other-drink breaks at sundown on our evening drives) next to a huge pool with about 25 hippos in it! this was after we all got WAY too close to a croc and our guides took turns seeing how close to it they would get! yikes!!! but the hippos were SUPER fun! anyway, i had a GREAT time there, and can totally ramble for hours about each of the animals i saw but oh well....it was SUPER cold there at night but SUPER warm during the day-6am wakeup calls were not conducive to me being friendly, esp when i was still cold wearing 2 layers of pants and 4 long sleve layers on top! booooo! but it was TOTALLY worth it!
We also spent a day at maholoholo rehabilitation center- i thought the tour was really good, but unfortunately, most of the animals, esp the birds, weren't being rehabilitated :( but they did let us PET A CHEETAH and have some of the vultures fly to our gloves! very very cool! our friend thomas also got to feed a huge leg of something to wild dogs and watch them tear it to pieces in a few minutes- while the owner of the center held a large bat in case they came after himself or thomas!!! yikes!!!!
we were pretty sad to leave- our drivers were SUPER cool, but we also knew that it was almost time to leave and most of the group to go back to the US :( but our last night included a dance performance from our drivers' village, and a lot of our own dancing as well heh.....
i'm going to try to post pictures soon, i promise, but this computer doesnt have a USB connection, so i have no way of getting them on- these are imported facebook, so the quality might not be very good :( BUT if you want to see more (and ones of me) just check out my facebook- there's TONS on there now, and if you dont have facebook, they're coming, i promise!