on safari

A few weekends ago, the men of the Miller family offered to take Ellie, Mary and me to Uganda to Queen Elizabeth Park to go for a safari. I really like animals, but I didn't feel any great need to drive around and see them when I got here. However, when you are in Africa, you should probably go on safari at least once. You have to. It's safari. Also, turns out that it was insanely cool and definitely felt like being in The Lion King.

We stayed at this amazing place right outside the park called Queen Elizabeth Bush Lodge. The food there was amazing and we were treated to a veritable symphony of hippo grunts and groans at all times as we were just above a waterway. This is the amazing tent palace that we stayed in courtesy of the Millers.

It was crazy driving in from Rwanda to go from mountains to absolutely flat land.

We saw buffalo.

These are cob. They were everywhere and made it feel like I was actually just driving through my neighborhood on a particularly deer-filled night. I wanted to stop and say, "I bring greetings from your brothers in America!"

We saw water buck.

We saw the circle of life in action.

We saw two, young, male lions.

The headed into the bushes to escape the heat of the day.

The second day we were there, we went on this long drive through a host of craters that are in the park. It was so beautiful. It's actually impossible to tell you how insanely beautiful it was. Each crater had one or two groups of elephants in it. These were big groups, too, and full of baby elephants that I really wanted to take home so that we could be best friends, but they would not have fit in the car, and I didn't want to separate them from their mamas.

There is a herd of elephants down there.

Is this even real life?

God is one incredible painter.

Giant crater.

Then all the elephants were crossing the road right in front of us.

Wah! Baby! Elephants are so cool.

Not pictured here are the other animals that we saw that I didn't take pictures of: warthogs (my spirit animal), hippos, baboons, various birds, mongooses (mongeese? Why is English so hard?). The animal that really blew my mind was the hippo. Cognitively, I understand that hippos are huge, but they are actually SO MASSIVE. We went for a night drive and saw loads of hippos out on the plains because they come out of the water to graze at night, and I spent the whole time wondering how an animal of such size and girth could possibly support its weight on land. Literally, the most rotund animals that I have ever seen, even more rotund than Gerty!

We even got to stand on the equator. 

I was in two hemispheres at once.

I basically lived that scene from  A Walk to Remember.

Only my version was much more grand and awesome. Take that Nick Sparks.