Lions, lions, lions... OH MY!

On Saturday, taking Laura’s advice, I organized for a group of 7 of us to go to Drakenstein Lion Reserve where we would camp out with lions for the night. I had fairly high expectations, which were met and surpassed.

We rented a car and took off at around 1:30 towards Stellenbosch. It was a little confusing at the end finding the place but we found fairly quickly and checked in and met our host, Jan (Yan?)... We put our stuff away in our tents and then were free for the afternoon to spend some quality time with the lions. There were lions EVERYWHERE and I got some really beautiful pictures of them. They are actually nocturnal so a lot of them were sleeping during the day, but I still managed. I learned some fun facts about the reserve though. To start with, all of these lions were rescued from dangerous or potentially dangerous situations. Some were abused, kept as pets and starved, or rescued from poaching (One lion had a deformed jaw because he was abused and had his jaw broken). When taken to the reserve, which is completely privately funded- not backed by South Africa at all, they are tested with the new cubs to see if their personalities match up to see which can be placed in the cages together. One lion, Simba, was extremely aggressive and so had to be kept in a cage by herself. She’s the one roaring in mostly all of my pictures. They are fed 3 times a week, dead chickens, because it is illegal to feed them live animals because the animal would have no chance of survival in the cage with the lion. The lions are fine with it though because they’ve always been fed dead animals because they’ve always been in captivity and so don’t even know how to hunt. Lions in the wild only live to be about 10-12, but in captivity live longer til about 18. Simba was super old- 21, and this probably added to her poor attitude. There were also holes in the ground everywhere, which I thought were snake holes. I asked Jan about them though and it turned out they were only field mice holes, but these mice attracted snakes. He told us that the snake he saw often, the Cape Cobra, was extremely dangerous and if bitten, you would die within an hour. There is a anecdote though, so you would just have to make it to the hospital within the hour.

That night, Jan braai-ed for us, and there was tons of meat, potatoes, salad, and garlic bread. It was a great meal during the sunset and we followed it up with some rooibus tea (my favorite). One of the most amazing sights was the sky this night. I saw the Milky Way, Southern Cross, O’Ryan’s Belt, Mars, and even a shooting star. We laid out under the stars for a while and then took our lanterns to sneak up on some lions in the dark – very scary. A lion ran up to the cage and roared in the complete darkness and we all screamed. We eventually “went to sleep” except I wouldn’t really say that because we were up all night with the lion’s roaring. Apparently when one does, the others will follow because they are fighting about “ownership” of the land and being the most dominant. There were literally lions 4 feet from our tent so it was extremely loud and the tent was actually vibrating.

We decided to “wake up” or give up sleeping at 6 am to watch the sunrise. This was again a beautiful sight, with the lions all around us.

In the morning we stopped in Observatory for breakfast and made it back just in time for our rental car to get picked up. We were going to a concert at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in the afternoon so we planned on taking naps but that didn’t happen so we went to the concert really tired. I thought I didn’t know the band but it turns out that they are the background singers in Waka Waka Africa by Shakira; they’re called Freshlyground. It was a great concert atmosphere. Everyone was sprawled out on blankets on a huge uphill lawn drinking wine. We brought along some sandwiches, cheese and crackers, and random cucumbers and blueberries but it was a great little meal. Everyone danced when they played Waka Waka which was so fun.

Today I went to my class and then took the bus to Claremont to shop a little with a girl in my house, Dani. It was a lot of fun and we found some great stores. Afterwards I was off to my Wynberg for my internship at PASSOP. We did some more planning for the event, I input some surveys and just talked to Braam about how he was “forcibly removed” this weekend while protesting against the ANC leader- Malema. It was funny to read the articles online about it, but also very interesting to read his letter to the ANC to complain about how he was denied his right to give his opinions and freely express. Tonight we went to Mama Africa* which is a great restaurant in downtown Cape Town on Long Street that has authentic African food and live music. It was really good food and was just such a fun place to be and eat. Definitely something you have to experience while here. I only have 3 more days of class this week because there’s a public holiday on Wednesday – Human Rights Day, which I am so thankful for because I am still catching up on sleep from this weekend. On the day off, I will hopefully be headed to Green Market Square where they sell a bunch of African trinkets and souvenir things but it’s pretty flea-market ish. It’s Dani’s birthday that day too so we’re probably spending the day on the beach relaxing. That means tomorrow I actually have to start doing work because I have so much due next week before break!

Tomorrow’s the first day of spring at home, which means that fall is officially starting here tomorrow! Not too worried, because “cold” here is 65 but it’s still so weird that it will be fall. Also hard to believe tomorrow marks 2 months in Africa. So, so crazy.
Figured out how to put pictures in here, yay!