Leaving South Africa

I know I’ve been bad at updating this blog, but I guess I just got caught up in everything at CARE. After about 5 months at CARE, raising my two boys, Orion and Awesome, all day and all night, I finally weaned them to not sleep with me. This process was not an easy one. You basically have to shove them screaming into a cage where they will sleep for the night. But for the first time in months I slept alone, without any baby baboons. It was a very strange and lonely feeling, but also liberating. I no longer had to worry all night about my boys running everywhere, knocking things over, changing nappies, making bottles, etc. That said, I did miss them very much at night.

 

Our last night sleeping together

Lajuma mountains

Since I was no longer solely responsible for those two kids, I decided to take a few weeks off from CARE and see some other friends. I spent a few weeks with my best friend, Joselyn at Lajuma Research Center. She was doing field work studying behaviors of wild baboons up in the mountains. It was great to get away and spend time with new people and in a new environment. We went hiking and swimming and just hung around doing mostly nothing. It was super relaxing. I then spent a week in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital with Joselyn and our other friends Zurika and Dylan, all of whom I’d met at CARE. We had a nice little braai and party for my birthday. I spent a weekend with Dylan at his friends’ farm, which was amazing and relaxing. A final night was spent in Pretoria where I had to say goodbye to two of my closest friends from CARE, Adam and Dylan. Dylan had left working at CARE to pursue other things and Adam was leaving on a vacation and wouldn’t get back until after I would leave CARE. These two guys had become two of my closest friends ever and I miss hanging out with them very much. I then drove back to CARE with my other good friend Matt, who sadly departed the next day back to Holland. 

 

Me, Dylan, and Joselyn with some birthday tequila

Perseus, the porcupine skull and quills I found at Lajuma

Me and Orion

Me and Awesome

My final two weeks at CARE were a whirlwind. I felt much better being there again after my brief vacation away. It was amazing to see my boys again, who had gotten so big. In my absence, they had integrated an older female baboon into the young baby troop. She took quite a liking to Orion. So much so that he began to sleep outside with her at night, and soon more and more of the Awesome Hok kids were sleeping outside with them, including Awesome. But not to worry, they still remembered who their mom was. We spent a lot of quality time together playing and taking naps. Orion loved to sleep inside my shirt while Awesome preferred to sleep as close to my face as possible. I also spent a lot of time taking photos and hanging out with some of the older baboons as well, including my other two boys Hillablue and Toughie. At the end of it all, I felt okay about leaving CARE, which has still a lot of work to do, but incredibly sad to leave my little boys. After spending almost every day all day with them, it’s very strange not to have them following me around.  But I know they are good kids and will grow up to be good baboons. 

Me and Toughie

My last night at CARE, I went out to dinner with Mary and her mom and sister who were visiting. As we were driving out of Grietjie, the nature reserve, we came across two lions, one male and one female, just sauntering down the road in front of us. We followed them for about half an hour before they finally turned into the bushes. It was very cool. We spent time at dinner talking about how awesome it was to see them one last time. But then on our way back to CARE a couple of hours later, we saw them again! There they were, closer to CARE this time, the male and female were lying right in the road again. We ended up following them for over an hour until we had to make the difficult decision to turn home due to our lack of gas in the car. But this time as the male was following the female down the road, he said down right in front of our car, right in the headlights, and roared. He was probably 15 feet from me and he roared. It was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. I could feel it in my bones. I legitimately almost had tears in my eyes. The couple got up and walked some more down the road, and by this time another car had joined us. For a few minutes the lions seemed a bit confused and kept walking in circles around our cars. Man, they are big up close! The female then ran down the road to greet another, younger female who had just come out of the bush! These two females started playing and rolling around on the road bathed in the light from our headlights, just like housecats do. We had to turn around at this point because we didn’t know if we’d have enough gas to get back to CARE and then back to town in the morning. If we did have enough gas I would have made us follow them until morning! It was an incredible last night in Africa, so see lions up close right in our backyard.

Awesome

 

Orion