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So clearly I am not good at keeping this up to date. I guess that life here just feels normal to me so I don't always feel like I have a ton to write about. But today is an exception. Last Friday I left with my roommate Andre to go to Mpumalanga (another province) and Kruger National Park. It was an amazing trip and I am so happy that I could see some more of South Africa.We started out by heading to the Blyde River Canyons in Mpumalanga (in our bosses Mercedes, just thought I would add that because it was very nerve racking driving on the left side of the road for the first time in our bosses NICE car). I actually was quite surprised by how easy it was to adapt to driving on the other side of the road. Just a few hours outside of Pretoria the landscape turned into the beautiful, lush and green mountains of the Drakensburg. It was so nice to see so much green again, I miss that about Oregon. We stayed at a little backpackers in a tiny town called Graskop (literally grass hills in Afrikaans) I met some Americans there from Peace Corps. It is always interesting to hear other Americans' opinions on South Africa. That's just a side note though. The nature reserve was absolutely incredible; it took my breath away on many occasions. We saw lots of waterfalls, the Lisbon, Berlin and Mac Mac. At the Lisbon falls Andre and I decided to try to make it to the bottom of the canyon rather then seeing it from up top at the view point. We made it through the river and trees filled with monkeys all the way to the pool in front of the falls. It was so awe inspiring, I decided to jump in and swim under the falls. It was freezing but well worth it. The next day we took a walk to the rain forest. That was an insane place, it went from grassy to rain forest back to grass covered hills. It was just this quant little rain forest tucked away in the midst of grass, I fail to understand how it formed but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Sunday we headed the 50 kilometers to Kruger, going from the rainy green mountains to the hot bush was quite a shock. The park was amazing, though, within a few hours of entering the gate we saw our first zebras, elephants and giraffe. Over the three days we saw a ton of animals and we were actually able to see all of the big 5, elephants, rhinos, lions, leopard, and water buffalo. We were able to see all of them close up just next to the road. We had a few close encounters where it looked like an elephant was about to charge our car. We speed off on a few occasions. I have to say that the leopard we saw was just about the coolest thing ever. It was in a tree just on the side of the road and it had a killed springbok in the tree with him. That was crazy to see. We were able to get some crazy awesome pictures as well, which I will post as soon as I sort through the hundreds and hundreds of pictures both Andre and I took. Anyway I should get back to work now. I will try to update this on a more regular basis from now on. I am headed to Soweto for the weekend for my cousin's 21st birthday party so that should be fun and as always it will be nice to see my host family again.
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