How much money did you spend to go see monkeys in Africa?

I saw this earlier today 3 miles from my house.

My other interesting "moment of perceived threat". Recall that we're in this area where we just saw a large leopard, and where there are herds of cape buffalo and hippo and elephants and stuff roaming around.

So we're driving around and it gets dark and the ranger says, "Let's keep driving a little bit and see if we see anything interesting." So we're driving around and not seeing much, and pssssssh! Flat tire.

The ranger is muttering curses about changing the tire in the dark and says, "You guys don't know how lucky you are. I just checked the spare before we left and it was flat, so I had a mechanic put a new spare in."

He jacks up the vehicle, takes off the flat, and gets the spare out. Conk. It turns out that land rovers have five lug nuts, and the game park's new Isuzu vehicle has the same size tire, but with six lug nuts. Guess which spare tire we got.

So the ranger is cursing again, and he gets out his cell phone. We'd seen him use it before to coordinate with another land rover if someone saw something interesting. For example, in the elephant panic he called the other land rover and the two of us met up on a trail to try to find them.

Well, his cell phone wasn't working. So we're sitting in this land rover with a flat and no spare, and no way to communicate with another land rover to pick us up. So we end up bailing out of the land rover and being leopard bait for a half-mile or so in absolute pitch-black night to get to a ranger station so he can get help. I had my cell phone with me as a backup camera, and we used it as a flashlight. It was one of those situations where you think to yourself, "Y'know, it's not unfathomable that I could be eaten by a leopard in the next 20 minutes." Fortunately, there were no leopard attacks, though, and we got to the ranger station and got rescued.

They look tasty....

Well, sure, but were they vervet monkeys? Mine were vervet monkeys.

A couple of Zulu dancers hanging out at the lobby. The cool thing is that some went around topless and the rest just had these little strings of beads up there that didn't cover much. I saw more Zulu nipple this month than in my entire life up to that point, and this wasn't National Geographic Zulu nipple hanging down to the belly button. This was the good kind of Zulu nipple.

And I know it's worthless without pics, but I either never had my camera or was in a situation where taking such a picture would seem gauche.

One day we ventured out of our park and went to Hluhluwe and Umfolozi Parks, which were big parks that had lions and cheetahs. Unfortunately, we didn't see any, but we did see some other cool creatures. Here are a couple of giraffes.

We had to stop for a while because an elephant was standing in the middle of the road.

Why did the elephant cross the road?

To drink from the puddle on the other side.

Close-up of snorkeling elephant.

I'll bet there were some vervet monkeys there. This guy owns a monkey sanctuary. He has more than 80 monkeys on his property.

Donger?

Baboon, I think. Either that or a small bigfoot. Pretty sure it's a baboon.

Water buck.

Guinea fowl.

Great show so far Kevin. We want more.