Sat. 20 Sept.
This is our second last day of the Safari, and I have elected to pass on Elephant Safari and also on the Lion Walk, which others in our group are going on. Instead, it is a morning to sleep in a bit and then do some relaxing before our long journey home commences.
I am up at 6:30 and wander up for breakfast beside the river by myself. The Elephant Safari left at 6 AM and Bob is still asleep. As I sit enjoying a coffee and the early morning sun, a young man calls over to me that there is an elephant on the bank across the river. He was the teacher I was talking to yesterday and I end up enjoying my breakfast whilst watching the elephant across the river for about 20 minutes before he ambled off.
Bob and I catch the shuttle downtown to do some shopping at 9 AM. We are dropped off at the open market and as soon as Bob buys something. there are about 5 guys wanting to sell us things. The only way we can get rid of these street vendors is to duck into shops nearby. We soon become engrossed in what is available and I am quite taken with the ironwood carvings. A young fellow named George (after King George) tries hard to sell me a carving, but it is too expensive and too heavy for the plane. I then mention I am looking for a child's T shirt, and he says he knows a good place. Well, he ends up shepherding us all over the place and also keeps the street vendors at bay. We find most of what we are looking for, and give him a nice tip for his trouble. One of the big items tourists purchase is the old Zimbabwe dollars. During the Mugabe years, inflation became out of control and skyrocketed to 1600 percent. They were printing money like it was going out of style, because it was! You were lucky to find anything in the stores to buy. If you went to the store to buy a loaf of bread in the morning, it might cost 50 dollars. By nighttime, if you wanted another loaf, it might cost you 300 dollars! For that reason, people spent their money as fast as they could, as it would buy nothing if you kept it for very long. I purchased as set of the old money and have a couple of Trillion dollar bills for TJ.
We take a taxi ride back to the hotel and have a couple of drinks with Bill and Cheryl. Bob relaxes while I go for a swim. Afterwards we go back to the room as it is getting humid outside and Bob sleeps while I go over my photos. At 5 in the afternoon, I take a look out our front door to find a small herd of Warthogs outside with a setting sun lighting them nicely. Photo-op I think, and grab my camera for some shots.
Supper is once again a buffet but it seems some of our group have had it with buffets and instead want a regular meal where they don't have to get up and wait in line. Misheck hands out questionaires on the tour he wants us to fill out. It seems a couple of our group are not pleased with something and they elects to sit by themselves for upper.
We have a chance to catch up with everyone else during supper and it seems the group that went on the Elephant Safari were not that happy with it. The only wildlife they saw was the elephants they were riding. lol.
The Lion Walk was interesting but did not get any big rave reviews from those that attended it, so I was kinda happy that I took the day to just relax.
We crashed early, as Bob wanted to pack and I was also wanting to do the same. This was our last night of the safari and I think most of us were getting a bit anxious to be heading home. Misheck has arranged our ride to the airport at 11 as our departure is 1:30.
Bob has packed and re-packed as he has purchased a couple of items that might weigh him down. This suddenly reminded me of a joke Tim had told prior to our helicopter flight yesterday about a young girl who, when asked what she wanted to do on her date said "I want to be weighed" ..... She is oriental and ..... Chris does not get the joke for awhile which is kind of funny. The reason Tim told it was because we all had to be weighted prior to our flight to ensure we were in the correct seats in the chopper.
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