Shows and Daan Vailjoen

YAY! The internet is working again at the house we’re staying at!!
We’ve now made it through 2 shows and a preview. It’s actually going quite smooth too! We now have monitors, which has helped SO much! We also moved my keyboard so I have communication with everyone!
The preview show on Wednesday morning for the school kids went pretty well. They seemed to enjoy it but not necessarily understand it. My favorite part was when the narrators ask at one point “Do you understand what is happening?” and half the audience replied “NO!” heehee
On Thursday morning we went to Elizabeth’s house. She’s a friend of Engelhardts (and Scott know’s her well too) She’s originally from USA but has been living in Africa since the early ‘90’s. Her house is INCREDIBLE!! The nicest house I think I’ve ever been in! We had an amazing brunch outside under her little thatched roof area. After that Joel, Engelhardt and I went swimming in her outdoor pool. So nice! She has two beautiful big dogs too that jumped in after they came back from their walk. Funny stuff!
Opening night on Thursday was good. There was quite a big crowd there.
So yesterday morning though, we did something completely not musical related! Scott found out that there were some geocaches about 18 km out of Windhoek in a game reserve called Daan Vailjoen. So Joel, Scott and I headed out there for the morning. We first went to The Roof of Africa Inn for a yummy breakfast. (SO weird to be there without 80 koko’s running around!)
Daan Vailjoen is sort of a campsite/picnic site/game reserve with a restaurant. We made it around 10:30 and paid the entrance fee (a whole $10 Namibian…which works out to about $1.40) awesome!
We decided to do the game drive before finding the geocaches. It’s a really short drive (6.8km) and they have no predators (which is awesome because you can get out of your car and walk around!)
We literally drove on the drive for maybe 30 seconds when we rounded a bend right into 8 giraffes!! 2 of them standing right on the road in front of us! It was amazing! We got out of the car and walked around with them for a bit while they eyed us wearily. There were 2 babies too!! SO CUTE!
That was by far the best part of the gamedrive….we saw some wildebeests and oryx from far away – nothing like those giraffes. The views were amazing from up there though.
After the game drive we decided to do the walk (1.8km) The geocache was along this as well. It’s not really a path you follow, more like a dried riverbed and grassy areas with some spray painted rocks here and there to guide you. When you get to the end you end up at a ‘lake’ where the animals all go to drink. That was really awesome…as soon as we arrived there was a herd of eland and oryx. We’ve never seen eland before in the wold so that was really neat! There was just one (sort of) scary part when we walked through some wildebeests laying in the shade. Two of them got up when we passed and stared as down! They have some mean looking horns!!
The lake area was beautiful! Once the herds ran off we just hung around there for a bit watching all the birds/ducks swim around. There was a beautiful big blue crane that flew by too. Amazing!
After the walk back we went straight to the restaurant and downed a bunch of cold drinks! It was HOT out! (and so so dry!) We saw a bunch of baboons on the way to the restaurant. One was trying to get into someones car!
After some refreshing showers we made it to the theatre for the evening show. Unfortunately there was a really small crowd (maybe about 40 people?) Apparently there was not very much advertising in the past couple weeks for the show. We have a matinee and an evening show today so hopefully there’ll be more people!
I think that’s about it right now – I gotta go have a shower!