Ok so the adventure begins!! Evan picked us up at the water front and we were on our way!! Damien decided to stay behind so it was Loryn, Ariel and I. Evans farm was about 3 hours from Cape Town and it was in Sanbona Wildlife Reserve. Along the way we stopped in a town called Barrydale and got our dinner for the night at the butcher shop which was some yummy lamb and sausage. South African LOVE there meat!! After stopping there we stopped up the street at the grocery store for a few things and at a black smiths shop just so we could see what it looks like.
We headed towards Sanbona and stopped at a place called Ronnies Sex Shop which is a restaurant/bar that by the looks of it is in the middle of nowhere!! But it was really cool the inside has bars and underwear hanging everywhere that had been left behind by tourists over the years. We grabbed lunch there before headed to the farm. On the sign at the front gate it said “Danger: Wild Animals - Entry at OWN risk.” When I saw that I got so excited!! I didn’t expect it to be actually INSIDE the game reserve!! Evan was telling us that there are only about 3 private properties in the reserve, his being one of them.
When we first arrived we took a little detour and Evan showed us a dead giraffe in the middle of one of the roads .. we all were about to get out of the truck to check it out and Evan said “wait. If you see a lion don’t move. OK lets go!” haha. We all got a laugh out of that! After taking a look at it we headed to Evans house. His house is surrounded by 2 gates and 1 is an electrical gate to keep everything out.
When we got to his house we all cleaned his house. After sweeping and mopping we headed out on a safari!! The roads were all bumpy dirt roads. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. We drove around for a while, all of us with our eyes wide open ready to spot anything! After a short time Evan stopped his truck and hopped out. He noticed some elephant footprints on the road and there were fresh droppings along the road too. The elephants were close by! We drove in the direction of the foot prints and stopped at a lookout post to see what we could see. We were all really quite just looking into the trees in the distance and all of the sudden we saw movement! We all hopped back in his truck and made out way in that direction. And there they were! ELEPHANTS :) there were a few of them, 1 adult and 2 younger ones and they were so close to the truck. We sat there and watched them eat for a while. It was so cool!
While we were on our way on the search for the next animals, Evan pointed out places where things happened to him. Like there was this one spot where he had a standoff with a lion when he was on horseback. It was only a short time before we stumbled across our next sight. There was a big family of giraffes all eating from a tree a short distance away from the car. Giraffes are very skittish and can be pretty aggressive so we had to be very quite while we were watching them even though they could hear us and would look straight at us when we weren’t making a sound! There were 6 giraffes total, 1 adult male, 2 adult females and 3 younger giraffes. The adult male was SO huge we didn’t see him at first then his head just popped up behind a tree as he began to walk to the other side of it. They are such beautiful animals! As we drove back toward Evans farm we saw a lot of antelope and some rhinos in the far distance.
When we arrived back to the farm Evan showed us around some more. We met all the piggies and saw where the chickens stayed at night. On his farm he has free range chickens that spend the day outside and then at night they know to go back into the coop and the gates locked to protect from animals that could break in. We also had a little egg scavenger hunt and tried to find all the chicken nests and the eggs for breakfast the next morning. :) that night we had braai which is the Afrikaans word for barbecue.. we had our lambs and sausages which were so yummy! After dinner we all went out and sat under the stars for a long time. It was so dark and you could see so many stars! You could even see the milky way! There were a lot of satellites too and shooting stars. While we were out looking at the stars you could hear animals walking around in the distance outside of the fence.
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