Just to let you know, there are elephants in camp...

Each morning, when we wake up, Chris and I have developed this routine. It isn't intentional, it just sort of happens this way... Here's how it goes.

1) One of us wakes up, opens their eyes a little and then closes them. Immediately afterward, they realize where we are, and their eyes shoot open much wider than believed to be humanly possible.
2) Awake person takes a deep breath, gets up and walks around the tent. Listens to the river and any sort of large predators off in the distance. Starts to get ready for the day.
3) Rustling of person #1 and sounds of elephants and lions cause person #2 to awake. They slightly open their eyes, close them, then they shoot open like person #1.
4) Person #2 gets up, scùttles to the window, peers out.
5) Person #1 says, "Yep. Still here..."
6) Person #2 repeats "Still here..."

It's kind of a nice reality check every morning. I can probably speak for the both of us when I say that we have come to enjoy the routine, which made yesterday's wake up call even stranger than one might already think it was. Here's what happened...

Yesterday we woke up to someone coming into the tent, saying, "Just to warn you, there are elephants in the camp." This seemed like a funny observation to me because OF COURSE we had noticed that there were elephants outside of our tent. As the largest terrestrial animal, they are pretty bad at being discreet about their arrival and morning feast on the surrounding trees. And, its not like they were a ways away where we might have questioned the noises that we were hearing, they literally left grapefruit-sized poops just a few paces from our tent... So, needless to say, our usual wake up routine was disturbed by our visitors, though I thoroughly enjoyed their appearance.

I don't know if any of you have ever heard of Larium, the malaria prevention drug that causes crazy dreams and sometimes makes people a little psychotic, but Chris and I are both taking it. The dreams that I have had for the past 4 months have been strange to say the least, but I am usually pretty amused by them. FOr instance, I recently dreamt that a man we met on a boat brought us to his mansion where there were warthogs swimming in their large pool... But yesterday my dreams took a turn for the worst. I had a dream that my friend was eaten by a crocodile (for those of you who were in Zanzibar- I'm talking about Devon) and it scared me so much... The strangest part was to wake up to the sounds of what I think were crocodiles in the river below us. In retrospect, it was ridiculous to freak myself out like that, but in the African bush it is hard to slow down your heart beat in the middle of the night.

So for those of you who have loyally stuck out this entire blog process sans pictures, I have very good news. Pictures are one their way. I managed to get a total of 3 pictures on photobucket in one hour, but then realized that I can upload them through facebook really easily. I've already put about 300 pictures up, and as soon as I straighten them out and label them, etc., I'll put a link to all of them up here. I hope you like them... Give me a few days and then check back.

The family that we are living with here are so amazing. It's really funny to see what has been normalized for the two kids, ages 7 and 9. When we sit around the bonfire eating dinner each night and talk about anything and everything, the kids often have to ask what some of the things that we are talking about are. For example, questions like, "Who are Beavis and Butthead?", änd then we talk about our worst jobs ever, and they ask, "What's K-Mart", "What's Wendy's?" and even questions like, "What's carpet?"... And while they don't know what these things are, they can spot bat-eared foxes in the dead of night on one glance, and could tell you anything about the ecology of any animal in the bush.

I know I last told some people that their son had a pet falcon, though I must correct myself. It's actually an African Hawk Eagle and it escaped last night. The retrieval process this morning was incredible. It involved ladders and ropes and climbing a huge tree and carrying the eagle down in one arm while the other one hung on to branches. I am surprised that nobody died or broke any limbs.

Okay, today we are going back in to town, so I will have more tales of dental vests and down jackets soon. Baadaye.