To Lusaka

Today, after many, many hours of driving, we arrived at the capital of Zambia - Lusaka. It's quite different going from the bush to a major city, with shopping malls, gas stations, food establishments, and hotels at every turn. We stopped at a mall for about 30 minutes to pick up some food/water and any other supplies we needed...which for me, meant a pair of tweezers. I am convinced that I packed my tweezers when I left home, but haven't been able to find them anywhere. Needless to say, my eyebrows were in HURTING shape after nearly A MONTH without tweezing. It was bad. And I'd looked for them in pretty much every shopping locale for the last few weeks and couldn't find them ANYWHERE. So I was seriously thrilled when we finally found a pair in Lusaka before getting back on the bus for the rest of our drive to our hotel.

We got to our hotel around 3 pm (hooray for an early arrival!) and discovered... zebras!

No big deal. Just chillin at our camp site.

Turns out, in Zambia at least, as long as you have the proper amount of land and permits, you can "purchase" wild animals and run sort of like a mini-conservation for them! So...

$500 = one impala/one kudu/one puku
$1,000 = one zebra
$3,000 = one giraffe!

Here I was thinking I didn't know the next time I'd encounter zebras and giraffes grazing freely, and then there they were! Not only that, but because they are clearly more used to being around people, you can get pretty close to them. At one point I was about 10 feet from a wild zebra!!

Don't get me wrong - they are STILL wild animals. If anyone got too close or they felt threatened in any way they would stamp one of their back legs and you would know to slowly back up immediately (for the record they never did this to me!) But it was SO incredible being that close to them. They were so tame it felt like you could just walk right up to them and start petting them (which I NEVER would have done but man the temptation was there!) They are such beautiful creatures and I'm so glad we got to have this experience with them :).

After taking a zillion more pictures (because I don't think I'll ever have enough zebra pictures), I headed off to the BEST shower of the trip AND THEN TWEEZED MY EYEBROWS (WOO WOO!!!!!!!!) and Jon went off to the bar to play darts with Mike and Roger (and to kick their butts every time might I add ;-)).

Next came our last dinner together as a trip (minus Jodi who had decided to eat a hamburger at the bar :-p). Calisto and Mark spoke about how we are now ambassadors to Africa and can encourage our friends and family to go and visit. SO GO VISIT!! And seriously, if you're interested in learning more about our trip, logistics, pros and cons of travel tours, etc. etc., let us know and we'll be happy to answer any questions about our experiences in Africa!

After dinner we headed back to the bar, Jon for more darts (which he (again) crushed :-D) and me to say goodbye to Jodi, who is heading back to Nairobi tomorrow from Lusaka instead of driving with us to Victoria Falls. Hoping we can meet up with her again when we get to Sydney in a few weeks!

Time for bed now - 4:30 am wake up call is going to come VERY quickly!

Jess' highlight of the day: ZEBRAS!!!
Jon's highlight of the day: Jess tweezing her eyebrows. For real.