Day 9 - No we weren’t eaten by lions, just a power outage!

Today was a travel day to our first Safari at the Entabeni Reserve. We flew South African airways and I had asked our tour manager, David, if we would get fed on the flight. He said, if we don’t get fed we don’t fly..life in Africa. Our flight was uneventful and we were picked up by a new driver, Molefi, which means My Provider, or Lefi for short. We had a three hour drive to the game preserve and during the drive we were stopped by the police. When we asked David, what was up? He said the road we were on is the main road for illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe to Johannesburg and the immigrants often travel in buses and are then extorted by the police! After arriving at the gate of the preserve, it took another 45 minutes to reach the lodge. During the trip in we saw kudu, baboons and wildebeest. As we reached the lodge the heavens opened up and we had a tremendous thunderstorm with very high wind- over 70kph. We were told they hadn’t had rain like that in 2 years. The wind knocked down a large tree next to the lodge and a lot of smaller branches from the other trees. The power had been out for some time and the generator was not working, so candle power lit the way and delayed the posting of this blog. We checked in and our chalet had a bed with mosquito netting around it...we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Since it was raining so hard our first Safari was cancelled, so up early tomorrow to see the animals. We did see a beautiful sunset and then it started raining again. We went to the main lodge for dinner and they finally got the generator running so the chef could finish our meal. We had a nice dinner with a nice bottle of a SA pinotage. No internet or wifi tonight, so we will post tomorrow.