Friday 29th March - Monday 1st Aoril - Easter with a difference!

Easter was completely different this year then it has ever been, and probably ever will be! We spent Easter in Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Game Reserve with some friends from church and Hillary. The game reserve is well known for the "Big Five" (Lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and buffalo) and is about 4 hours drive from Howick up north. After game drives in Kenya I was expecting the same sort of scenery - completely bare and bright red sands! I was so wrong! It was all green, and lively and covered in bush. The views were incredible and reminded the whole team just how incredible God is! The world is the most incredible, beautiful place.
We were so, so lucky as we were staying in a completly private, hidden staff camp, 4ks off the main game drive!! It was so quite, and was perfect for seeing wildlife. The tents were stacked up on wooden platforms so that none of the animals could join us in ours tents at night. This was because the camp were we staying in only had an elephant fence around it (prevents only elephants from coming in) and was deep in the game reserve so the animals could come and go as the pleased. One night when we were sat on the grass by the campfire Esther suddenly shouted "hyena" and there was a hyena literally a metre away from us which was so exciting! From the campfire we could look over the river and regularly saw rhino, buffalo, buck and crocodile. The toilets and showers were in wooden sheds, and the shower was a bucket shower which was loads of fun.
The weather was so good and so this made the game drives so much more fun. We were up at 5:30am every morning to go for early morning drives in the hope of seeing something exciting.... On Easter Sunday morning we were blessed enough to a pack of African Wild Dogs which was so, so, so rare!! There are only around 20 in the whole park, so we were so, so, so stoked to see them! We saw loads of super cool wildlife like giraffe, gazele, impale, zebra, rhino, wildebeast, buffalo, crocodile, elephant, nyala, wild dog, terapin.. Sadly we only saw 3 of the Big five - missing out on lion and leopards.. but we saw so many rhinos, some so close we could practically touch them.
Driving home was sad as we'd had such a good weekend, but it gave us so much time to reflect on creation, and how lucky we all were that we are able to do these incredible things, and see so much of God's World!