On Saturday, I spent the morning in the hotel recovering from the chipata and beans I had eaten the previous day. It will be some time before I venture into a local “restaurant” again. Katie however was completely unaffected and therefore setout to visit the elephant orphanage and giraffe park, so she's taking it from here.
Ok, so while Pete was curled in the fetal position (okay, he wasn't really, he actually did our laundry) I went and played with baby elephants and giraffes! We started the day at the elephant orphanage where we watched baby elephants from 1 month old up to 3 years old get fed from bottles...and get stuck in puddles of mud. Young elephants are not very coordinated, which partially explains how these young 'uns end up at the orphanage -- they get stuck in holes and have to be left by the herd. Luckily, they are taken to the orphanage and raised there until they are old enough to head back out into the wild.
After the elephants were fed the orphange brought out a big surprise, a baby rhinoceros. At about 6 months old, that rhino was the biggest super star of any rhino in the world...or at least he thought he was. He ran around the edge of the crowd and at one point he rammed right into Jen, a fellow overlander standing next to me. Luckily he was small.
Our trip leader from our last leg of the trip took us to lunch with his aunt and uncle -- we all shared a goat...AWESOME.
Then we headed over to the Giraffe center where Rothschild Giraffes are sheltered. You can feed them food pellets similar to horse food. As you can see (hopefully, if the uploading works), they eat from your hands OR they'll take a pellet from your mouth. In hindsight, that sounds kind of gross, but since twiga (giraffes) are my favorite, it was just plain awesome.
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