Day 13: Lucky

I woke up to the sound of kitty paws pitter-pattering across the bedroom floor at 6:30 A.M. In walks Fury, meowing and ready to jump onto my bed. How cute, right? Fury then jumps down and starts playing with my belt at the end of the bed. Fine, cats are allowed to play. Fury then moves to under my bed, which is where I kept my travel pillows. I hear rustling, and I assume he is playing with them. I pull him out and put him on the bed. He jumps back down and is rustling under the bed again. I look under the bed. I really hope that what I see is not what I think it is. I grab my cell phone to use as a flashlight, and look again. Alas, it is a headless rodent that Fury was so kind as to bring to me and leave under my bed. After stumbling around in my pajamas, I find my leather gloves and carry the poor decapitated rodent outside, trailed closely by the two cats. They look completely horrified when I chuck it over the fence into an empty field. Then the offended feline follows me back into the house, meowing very loudly when I lock him out of the room. This is how my Friday the 13th started.
After my lovely morning adventure with Fury, I had a rather uneventful breakfast of cereal and a banana. As I mentioned yesterday, today was a day off for Paul and I. Paul wanted to see the Sterkfontein cave and I didn't have any better ideas, so that is where we went. Estelle picked us up around 8:30 A.M. and we made our way towards the caves, which are just outside of Johannesburg. When we were nearing our destination, the road up ahead was blocked and there was a detour and a strong stench of some sort of gas. Friday the 13th strikes again. Paul and I began to have misgivings about going 60 meters underground in small caves that were thousands of years old. Despite these detours and misgivings, we arrived at Sterkfontein and Paul and I bought our tickets for the caves and for Maropeng as well. We didn't really know what Maropeng was, but we figured we might as well since we were there and since the combo ticket was available. Estelle remained behind (she is clausterphobic) while Paul and I descended into the depths where the cradle of mankind is located. It wasn't as impressive as I would have hoped, to be completely honest. It was not as big as I expected, and there was a lot of "They are doing excavations over there behind those bars but we can't go there". It was still neat and a nice change from our normal routine, but it wasn't anything particularly mind-boggling. I would like to say that I at least learned a bunch about our beginnings, but our tour group was too big and I couldn't really hear much that she was saying. What I did learn is that Sterkfontein is the site where "Little Foot" and "Mrs Ples" were found. "Little Foot" is an extraoridnarily complete hominin skeleton belonging to the Australopithicus species, found in the 90s by paleoanthropologist Ronald Clark. "Mrs Ples" is the nickname for the most complete skull of an Australopithacus africanus specimin ever found in South Africa. The other tidbit I learned was how to remember the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite - a statlCtite hangs "tite" from the Ceiling, while a stalaGmite is on the Ground and "mite" reach the ceiling.

Maropeng, as it turns out, is a big museum about human history and it was interesting enough, but obviously geared towards younger audiences. We rode this little "boat ride" that took us through the four elements of air, earth, fire and water, and I got a lot of weird, "artistic" photos. Observe:

The element of snow as interpreted by my camera

We finished up with everything by around 1:30 and arrived back at the Dell at around 4:00 without any further Friday the 13th happenings. When Leante and Dane arrived back from taking care of the cheetahs, we decided to go for a sunset bushwalk and picnic. Before we left, however, Friday the 13th struck once more. Leante locked her keys in the car, but we decided to let it go until we got back from our walk. We were racing the setting of the sun as we tried to get to the viewpoint before it disappeared. In the process, we chased a giraffe up most of the hill and saw some Eland. After a very brisk walk up the hill, we managed to see a beautiful sunset and have a lovely picnic. I enjoyed this the most out of everything we did today. It was beautiful and so much fun.

The sunsets here are so much different from the sunsets back in Ohio. Here you actually see the sun go down. It is not a gradual process at all. It happens so quickly...the time between the 2nd and 3rd photos above is probably only two minutes. It is so amazing.
Once the sun and all of our junk food (including Doritos, cheese and crackers, doughnuts...) was gone, we went back to the house and attempted to jimmy Leante's car lock. We failed. I don't know if this is a testiment to her car's locks or to our ineptitude. We'll never know. Tomorrow we're going to have to figure out a less devious way of getting her car unlocked.
So that's it for the day. Tomorrow starts early with a cheetah run, so I'm going off to bed. Here is a photo of Thunder, since he is so Friday the 13th-themed:

Good luck y'all!
Taylor