August 13, 2012  

 Another great P-day.  This time we went with the Elders to Mpongo Private Game Reserve.  As we started the day, we couldn’t decide if we really even wanted to go.  It is outside East London, which is a 2 hour drive. That plus leaving at 11am and time in the park and another 2 hour drive home, we weren’t sure we wanted to do that today.  But, we made the right choice.

 It was a lot of fun.  The first things we saw were a lot of different species of grazing animals. 
 

Some of them were just grazing and lying down so close to the road that Elder Dale and Elder Scicluna decided it would be fun to chase them and see what would happen.  They got out of the car and ran after them. Elder Dale was making sounds like a clucking chicken, of all things.  It must mean something in African jungle language because they sure took off. We now call him “super chicken”.  It was very funny to watch as they all ran like crazy to escape the crazy person chasing them. 

 I wanted to see giraffe, which I saw, up close and almost personal. 

 The best part was the encounter, sort of with a rhino.   A very large mamma and her baby actually came onto the road and of course Elder Scicluna was VERY excited, as that was what he wanted to see quite badly.

The rhino was going one way and we were pointed the other way, so Elder Scicluna backed the car up chasing the rhino as President Stumm was videoing the event.  We got some great video. 
When that was over, we were driving down the road and came around a corner and there in the middle of the road was an ostrich!

Well, with Elder Scicluna driving, we chased the poor thing.  It was really quite funny and it would run in front of us with its feathers all puffed out and looking back at us now and then.  It finally ran onto the side of the road and we went by.  President got some great video of that adventure, as well.  We decided to turn around and go back to a road we hadn’t driven on yet and, yes, we saw the ostrich again.  This time it was off the road, so Elder Dale, otherwise now known as “super chicken”, decided to chase the ostrich with his chicken sound.  Again it was very funny…the whole thing. 

Elder Dale had the eagles eyes today and spotted a lizard at the side of the road.  We stopped and got some pictures.  It was a water monitor lizard, about 6 feet long.  There were actually two of them, but one of them quickly ran down a hole.

Elder Dale got to touch the end of this lizards tail, before it ran off into the bush.  That made him happy.  We saw a lot of animals today, including a water buffalo from far away.  We also saw a lynx outside the park grounds as we were leaving.  We ended up being the last ones to leave the park at 6 pm when it closed.  The Elders were staying in East London for a small zone conference and since we didn’t have to go to this one we headed home.  We arrived back in Port Alfred around 8 pm. It was a great day.