Saturday, June 24, 2006

Just a normal day on the Serengeti

Here are a couple more pictures of animals we saw in Africa! We saw some full-grown elephants on our game drive, but these are some baby elephants that we saw at the Elephant Orphange. I love the fact that the elephant in the lower left corner is holding the hose with his trunk. I guess he was going to surprise his friends by spraying them while they wallowed in that mud puddle. These baby elephants are rescued from the wild when there is no adult elephant to take care of them, which usually happens because their mom's die (often because of the poaching problem that still exsists in Kenya), and the herd will not care for them. They are cared for here until they are able to care for themselves, and then they are released back into the wild.



And here we see Nathan, famed Safari explorer, earnestly studying a giraffe. I can't be sure, of course, but I assume he's thinking something along the lines of, "What's the big deal? I had my hand in the mouth of one of these things just the other day!" If nothing else, this picture shows you just how close we were to these animals during our game drives. We stayed in the van almost the entire time, but there were many moments when we could have easily reached out and touched an animal or two. It was an amazing experience and one I won't ever forget. More pictures of some other animals coming soon!

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