Everyday we went on game drives and everyday we saw something completely different! My favorite part was watching a mommy warthog and her 2 babies take a mud bath and then scratch themselves on a rock. It was hilarious! I think Graham's favorite part was watching a pride of lions lunching on a zebra (yuck!).
Another thing that we were really lucky to see was the great migration of wildebeest and zebra right outside of our tent. The zebra and wildebeest always travel together because the zebra have really good sense of smell (they can smell where the water is) and the wildebeests have better eyesight which keeps them both safe at night.
One night in the Serengeti, Graham woke me up at around midnight to see an elephant- oh about 20 feet from our tent! I'm pretty sure I've never been so scared in my whole life!!!!! We watched the elephant by moonlight eating from a tree and a few minutes later he made a loud bellowing noise. At this point, I was trying to decide if hiding under our beds (yes we had real beds in our tent) would save my life if the elephant trampled our tent. It turns out the bellowing noise was to call all his buddies for a meeting, which they also had right outside of our tent. It was unreal! We didn't get trampled on and eventually went back to bed, but boy it was scary!
In total, we saw hippos, rhinos, cheetahs, leopards, lions, elephants, zebra, giraffes, jackals, warthogs, hyenas, monkeys, baboons, impalas, dik diks, water buffalo, wildebeests, alligator, ostriches, various reptiles, insects and dozens of birds.
All four of us had such a great time and were looking forward to getting back to Portugal and do some more exploring before Harry and Theo departed for Vermont. We got one day of sightseeing in before Harry fell ill. He woke up at 2 in the morning with horrible abdominal pain and ended up in the ER later that morning. He had surgery on his small intestine later that evening and has been in the hospital recovering ever since, almost 2 weeks. Poor guy is desperate to get out of the Portuguese hospital and get back to US soil. I'm happy to say that they started feeding him real food last night and he is tolerating it well and will be discharged tomorrow! Graham and I will accompany him and Theo back to Vermont in the next few days, about a week earlier than our original plan. Yay! We hope for an uneventful flight home and a speedy recovery for Harry! Sidenote: ER bill including ambulance ride was 32 euros! CT scan was 9.60, ambulance ride 4.30....if only it were this way in America!
Our plans for the rest of the summer are to hang out in America for about 3 weeks and then we are heading back over the big pond to France! We'll be in France for about 2 weeks, back to Portugal for a few days and then on to Albania for about 10 days for a friend's wedding. After our trip to Albania, we will meet my parents in Italy for about a week and then all four of us will come back to Portugal. We hope to take them to Spain for a few days. This has definitely been a great experience so far, but we are soooooo excited to get back home for a bit. Hope to see you soon!
Here are a few pics!
