Fun Drives and a "Burglary"

Late on Saturday afternoon we went for a drive through the reserve where we were staying.

 Jess and I had a good view from the back of the bakkie though at times we had to do quite a bit of ducking to avoid branches overhead and on the sides and so that we wouldn't be 'punctured' by thorn trees. :P

We saw quite a lot of different animals like Impala, Nyala, Warthogs, Grey Duiker, Giraffe, three majestic male Kudu with incredibly long horns, also lots of different kinds of birds. Unfortunately we couldn't get very good photos of them and many darted off before we could even point the camera in their direction.

Small herd of Impala

Termite mounds are a favourite home for many animals. They make burrows in the mound. The Dwalf Mongooses we came across had used one for their home. We couldn't get a picture of them as they went scurrying off into the burrow so quickly! Here's a picture though of what they look like - they are so very cute! :)

There are a number of hides in the game reserve, this one overlooks a small dam, there was a family of warthogs having a mudbath at the edge of the water and they weren't too happy about being disturbed! :)

Driving back to our rondawels we didn't know just what was waiting for us!... We opened the front door and got a shock! In fact, at first we couldn't believe what we were seeing....We'd seen a similar scene when our house was burgled - things were lying all around, one of the window screens had been ripped off the windows, our suitcase was lying open on the floor!! For a minute there we were really depressed to think that such a thing had happened here - that's until we saw the naartjie peels lying all over the place! :D The "burglars" were the monkeys!! They are so clever- they had actually lifted up the insect screen on the window and got in that way. They obviously had quite a time going through everything, even opening our bag, the little terrors! There were paw prints all over our parents bed so they must have been jumping on there. The dressingtable cloth also had paw marks on it and the mirror had 'smudgy' marks, ( I wonder what they thought of their reflections?)  :)

They inspected the bathroom and opened the soap wrapper - there were dirty little finger marks on the white soap. The funniest thing of all is that they had actually used one of Dad's hankichiefs to put the naartjie pips in - yes, they really did that!! =))

Well, they gave us a nice lot of clean-up work to do but we were all laughing through it, imagining just how they must have been carrying on. Naughty, clever creatures!

One of the culprits with his "spoils" ! :P :D

The end of our two packets of naartjies. :P

 Late that night, after our braai we went for a night drive. We didn't really see much but it's quite an experience being out there in the dark. And it's really dark! At one stage Dad stopped the car and switched off the lights for a few seconds, it was just blackness all around, we couldn't even see our hands in front of our faces. We couldn't see anything! How much we appreciate the light then and how thankful we are for the Light of God's Word!