I was able to narrow down my thousands of pictures to 499 (a combination of pictures from the old and new camera both)… now I have to narrow that down even further because printing them out will cost a small fortune. I always feel the need to print out my photos, I don’t know why…

So here goes, starting at the end, on our very last day of our trip in Zambia, we actually began this very long day riding elephants. This was the very day we flew back to connect in Johannesburg and that horrible 11-almost-12-hour never-ending flight back to London where we promptly fell asleep on a very comfortable couch at the airport and then had our 6 (or was it 7?) hour flight back to Toronto where I experienced feelings between sickness, anger, frustration, and overall a real lack of sleep. Overall, I was just fed up with planes. Yup, a very long day…

…but I began the day on an elephant!

I forget the name of my elephant, I think it was mama or mommy.  Vick got to ride the biggest male elephant and mine apparently was known as the bossy mother in law. My ride did seem to have a mind of her own always wanting to eat and not follow the trainer’s orders to walk:

As you can see, she really is, just constantly eating.

After an hour on the elephants we got to feed all 10 of them (as if mine didn’t eat enough for the past hour). We fed each one at a time, first by putting food directly into those big hungry mouths and second by holding out food and letting them pick it up with their trunks to put in their own mouths.

Riding an african elephant, I must say was one of the coolest things I’ve done. This SO beats riding a horse, riding a camel, and somewhat riding a dolphin. The best thing was that we were the only tourists that day and so we got to go out with the whole family of elephants. There were about 10 elephants in total travelling with us.

We spent a good amount of time on our own elephants walking through the forest and plants. The location was really big, the elephants are free to roam around where they please and the area isn’t roped off or anything, just set very far back from a dirt road. It was as real of an experience riding an elephant in the wild that we could get. And to be honest, while I like getting my money’s worth of activity, I actually felt we had too long a time on the elephants… in other words, my butt was really starting to hurt! Unlike Vick, I had fully followed the instructions to wear long sleeves and pants to avoid bug bites, so not only was my behind sore, I was sweating in the hot sun.

My favourite pic, Vick and his elephant in shadow:

I’ve started the daunting task of looking through my hundreds thousands upon thousands of pictures.

I could write a whole story about some of the crazy things we saw that would never be allowed back home, home as in Canada. From petting a cheetah to swimming at the edge of a mighty waterfalls, and zebra and giraffe wandering freely around our resort…

I thoroughly enjoyed 90% of the trip to my parents homeland, the remaining 10% I got incredibly sick and hope I never get sick like that again.

Meeting family was the best.

God-willing really hope to go back within the next 3 years and visit the family and friends I didn’t get to meet and the cities we didn’t get to see. Time was not on our side, we did so much and it feels like so little.

I’m ready to blog now and share what I experienced in this beautiful country, so stay tuned.

Above: taken by Vicky from inside the car. Seatbelts anyone?!

So far so good!