Game Day

Lakeside Lodge Entabeni. That’s where we are tonight. We traveled half a day out of Johannesburg to get here. The safari jeeps met us at the edge of the land preserve and we said goodbye to our coach bus. We spent the second half of our day on safari. Yes, church pastors on a game drive. We’ve been looking forward to shooting big game armed only with iPhones, tablets, go-pro cameras on sticks and long range lenses. (Please note the last part of that sentence, dear speed reader.)

After 10 days of intense study the Wabash Pastoral Leadership Program is concluding our trip with this rich gift of land and wild life.
Our hopes were high that we would see the “big five,” lions, elephants, rhinoceros, leopard, and buffalo.

Our first ten minutes in we came across five adults and two young giraffes, and that was just on the way to our quarters.

On our sunset drive we were grateful for the new, 4-wheel drive, diesel Toyota jeep that took us on a 55 degree decline/incline along the escapement on the reserve (read: really big, really old geological drop off of rocky mountain to valley). We appreciated hippo from a distance, could have thrown a cell phone at a rhino, and were told by a female elephant that we were invading her personal space. She picked up sticks and threw them at our jeep while facing us head on. That pack of elephants had ten altogether.

We saw the rarely observed aardvark, always first in the yellow pages; one of the three cheetahs on the reserve, wildebeests, zebras, more giraffes, and lots of Impala and kudu.

I’m humbled to be a part of God’s creation here in the heartland of creation.