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.
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| Our last night sleeping together |
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| 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.
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| Me, Dylan, and Joselyn with some birthday tequila |
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| Perseus, the porcupine skull and quills I found at Lajuma |
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| Me and Orion |
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| Me and Awesome |
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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.
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| Me and Toughie |
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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.
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| Awesome | |
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| Orion | |
