Post Created Apr 13, 2011 4:01:45 PM

Yesterday, there were elephants right by our river; they couldn't have been more then 50 yards from us, but we watched them from a little ways up a hill. All of a sudden four of them decided to swim across the river. It was awesome. They put their whole heads under as they reached the deeper parts of the river and continued to swim to the far bank where two of them decided to aquatically copulate as the two others struggled up the bank. The elephants actually made quite a bit of noise swimming across, which I found surprising because they are so stealthy on land. A little later, Mandy, Elin, and I decided to see if any more were still around and sure enough there was one right in front of us on our side of the beach. This guy seemed to decide not to swim across. As we were sitting on our slope, we could here some rustling in the bushes nearby. We guessed that it was another elephant, but it wasn't moving much and it was still pretty quiet, and we weren't quite sure where on the slope it was in relation to us, so we continued to sit quietly watching the one at the river's edge. After a while longer we decided we had better check what the rustling might be. Sure enough there was a HUGE elephant just out of sight of where we were sitting, definitely closer than we thought, and the same height up the slope as we were. There would have been no escaping it had it decided to charge us through those bushes. But we moved so we could actually see the ele which turned out to be a tad closer, like 30 meters, and after a few minutes it looked up and flapped it's ears as a sign of anger so we quickly scurried back. We watched a few minutes longer as it walked away in the bushes. All in all it was an AWESOME two hours of elephants. Unfortunately I did not have my camera, or the energy to run and get it, during all this so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Last week I did manage to make my Apple Puff Pastries! Everyone seemed to really like them. We found an ingenious way of coring the apples quickly by using a power drill. No joke. This I do have pictures of to prove it. When in Rome...

The weather has started to cool down to the point where I have been wearing a sweatshirt most mornings and get to wear sweatpants finally to sleep in, which I am a little too excited about. We've had to de-worm the baby baboons, which means putting some stuff in their morning milk, but this makes them poop A LOT throughout the day. I know you would want to hear about that so...

I other good news, I found a friend to go to Namibia with!! For the first two weeks of June my friend Adam and I will be road tripping and camping around Namibia. It's an awesome country with German-like towns, an amazing game park, a cool coast line with lots of sea lions, and incredible sand dunes. We've been pretty excited about it. Me especially because I've been thinking about traveling there for months and months. So far we've only bought our plane tickets over there, but we're working on it. It's going to be awesome.

I also FINALLY contacted the woman who runs the orangutan sanctuary in Indonesia with whom I've been playing phone tag with for weeks, and we had a brief little interview. Seems like I've got an internship set up there starting in August. So everyone who asked me what I'm doing after this, I now have an answer! Working with orangutans in Indonesia!!

As sun sets over the bush, it's time to take in the babies to sleep so I must end this post here!