Finally some Touring...

Well, today we actually did get to see some of the wildlife Africa has. We hired a taxi driver to take us to 2 animal parks. The first was the Giraffe Center where they have 1 male, 6 female, and 2 baby female giraffes; all of them being from the endangered Rothschild sub-species. They breed this type and then release back into the wild when appropriate. The neat aspect about this park is that we got to feed the giraffes from our hands. They are incredibly gentle and are very careful as they take the feed pellets from your hand with their long, blue tongues. Some may think this is gross, but Laura and I actually "kissed" a giraffe as well. We put a pellet between our lips and the giraffe licks it right out. As it turns out, it is not really all that gross, because we learned that giraffe saliva is a natural antiseptic and sun screen. Unfortunately, we did not have our camera, but there was a couple there who took a lot of pictures. I gave them our e-mail address and he will be sending them to us soon, we hope.

Gabriella was very scared at first and she did not really want to get very close. After watching a few of us do some feeding, she decided to give it a try. After a couple of attempts, she did get a few pellets into the mouth. That, however, was as far as she was going to go. Kissing a giraffe was not going to happen today.

Next, our driver took us to a baby elephant orphanage. There are about 16 baby elephants under 2 years of age who had lost their mothers from any of a variety of reasons. This facility is only open to the public from 11 a.m. to noon each day as a way to limit the amount of human contact. Once they reach 2 years of age they are moved to another facility until they are 10 years old. After that they are returned to the wild.

The caretakers brought out about 8 at a time to an observation point where they feed them formula and let them play in a mud hole while other caretakers talked about the elephants and the facility itself. We were not able to go up to them, but if they came close to us we were allowed to reach out and touch them. They were so cute.

They also have 3 baby rhinoceros's, but since rhino's can be very aggressive, they only brought out the youngest which is 5 weeks old. Another cutie, and about the size of Magic, our Golden Retriever mix. He seemed very playful and actually ran into the crowd twice, but just to have a little fun. No one was hurt, and there were a lot of smiling faces.

That was a good morning for us, so we decided to just come back to the hotel. The hotel was hosting a craft festival so we walked around to see if there was anything of interest. Gabriella found a bracelet and a necklace, but that was about all we could find.

Later in the afternoon, we decided to take Gabriella to a hospital. Nothing serious, however over the time we have had her, her stomach has been giving her some problems. We assume it is because of the new diet she has, but we just wanted to have it checked out anyway. We were not able to get the tests we were hoping for, but the doctor said she looks good. We will be monitoring her now, because a stomach problem is the last thing we need as we prepare for our 18 hour return flight.

We went back to one of the malls near the hotel to check out another pizza place...Chicago's. Not the Uno's we are used to back in the US, but this pizza had a thicker crust than the one we had last. We ordered a large, because the last medium we had was pretty small. This was actually a large, and we had some leftover. However, just our luck, we walked off without the pizza box. Oh well, no cold pizza for breakfast....