Kruger National Park--Elephant Pictures!

These two elephant calves were feeding in a clearing of tall green trees with no adult in sight. We stopped the car to watch for a while, and eventually they crossed the road right in front of us.

Elephant crossing!

Female Elephants (possibly including Matriarch) with tiny calf. It was still unsteady on its feet.

Elephant!!

Older Calf attempting to suckle.

Well, we had a fantastic two days in Kruger National Park. It was uncharacteristically cold on the first day (about 15 C, which I'm told is in the low sixties Farenheit), and rainy, but I think that the wet conditions brought the animals out, as we saw almost everything except for Lions and Cheetahs. On Sunday night I took the high-speed Gautrain (pronounced the Afrikaans way--Hchow-tran) from Pretoria into the Johannesburg International Airport, where I met our friends at the hotel. I had my own hotel room for the first time, so I celebrated by making tea with plenty of sugar, burning my tongue on said tea, and staying up late watching movies. We set off at around 7 the next morning, and reached the Kruger Park Lodge at around 2. As we drove the country side changed from relatively flat with large farms to rolling green hills and then to hills covered with pine and eucalyptus trees bound for paper mills and finally to rocky hills covered with green bush and the occasional purple-blossoming jacaranda. The Kruger Park Lodge is a a golf resort on the Sabie River, and you can rent either rooms or an entire lodge with reed-thatched ceilings and great dark wood porches--housekeeping comes to you everyday, all the staff were very friendly, and breakfast and dinner are provided in the restaurant, where you can enjoy the ambiance of keroscene lamps, a high thatched ceiling, and music from the 60's, Neil Diamond, and Phantom of the Opera. Really, though, it was a fantastic place to stay--very luxurious in a simple, comfortable way.

Kruger was something amazing. Within our first forty minutes in the park we saw a Leopard quite a ways off in the bush (no great photos, unfortunately!), a Hyena, and were surrounded by a herd of grazing Elephants, including a calf so small it looked only weeks old. The second day was sunnier, thankfully, so we didn't have to keep rolling up the windows and turning the heat on, but most of the animals we saw were further away. I took about six hundred photos, so it's very hard to choose just a few good ones, but I'll try. I have seen many of these animals in zoos, of course, but two seemingly obvious things really strike you when you see them up close in the wild--Zebras' stripes are really wild looking, and Elephants are HUGE!! It's amazing to see them from a small car; you keep wanting them to come closer and closer and then suddenly, even though they haven't done anything aggressive, you have this sudden realization of how absolutely humongus they are and start minorly panicking! We also had some great sightings of Rhinos, Kudu (large antelope things with amazing curved horns), and Hippos. We also saw hundreds of Impala, but two neat Impala-related things we saw were a mother and very young baby, and two young male Impala fighting. I have not posted any pictures of the hours at a time we spent scrutinising African bush and seeing nothing, but I'll post a few "mystery" pictures to see if you can spot the animal. Camoflage works very well--even huge animals like Rhinos and Elephants can be nearly impossible to see.

I am still using a computer at a student center to write on, as internet on mine continues to be funky, so I apologize for the lack of frequent posts, emails, and photos. Trust me, it's more aggravating for me than it is for you... J.D.