I just had to bribe myself with a candy bar to get my lazy self to vacuum the ridiculous 29 square metres I call my flat. Pathetic 
And doing that I realized that I have no clue how to change the bag… Umm, yeah.
Now I guess you haven’t been sitting on the edge of your seats to read about me and the Incredible Laziness that I call my own. Yeah you’re all waiting for the story with the Huge Monster Elephant Who Almost Killed Me. “All” refers to my two readers – Hi Thorsten and Heidi!.
Well okay, your wish is my command, here goes:
It was Saturday, aka the third to last day in South Africa, and we were doing a Safari Tour with our guide Brian. He brought us to the Fairy Glen Game Reserve where we had a great breakfast and then met our ranger and started to drive with one of those huge 4x4s.
First we saw some Rhinos, peacefully grazing. I started taking pictures and then… my SD card died. It may be April 1st today, but I’m not kidding. Here’s one of my last pics before the memory card collapsed:
Murphy’s Law, I’m tellin’ ya. Back in Cape Town, the people from the photo shop in the Clock Tower Mall fortunately managed to rescue the card so that the holiday photos I took before – over 400(!!) – weren’t lost.
Then we continued driving on the field road and our ranger spotted the heads of two elephants somewhere way back, so we drove near them, he switched off the engine and started telling us about those two young bulls.
Suddenly the one you see in front started coming towards us. And even though he didn’t walk fast at all, he continued approaching at a steady pace onto the field road. Apparently he had no intention to stop, so our ranger started the engine and wanted to turn, but behind us there was some kind of rock, so we couldn’t just back off.
At this point the elephant was just about one or two metres away from the vehicle. Which was REALLY scary. The whole 4×4 was screaming (or maybe just the women. I can’t remember whether I screamed, I think I didn’t. I think I was occupied with being petrified in horror. Which might have been because I was sitting far left in the front row.) and our ranger tried to shy the bull away by approaching just a bit and making lots of noise and dust.
The elephant actually took a step backwards, but then continued coming towards us. Eventually our ranger managed to turn the vehicle in what felt like 100 steps (with the elephant in about one metre distance) and drove further away where we would be safe.
Can you see the shadow right at the bottom of the picture? That’s the frame of the (missing) windscreen of our 4×4. Yep. That’s how close this freakishly huge animal was. Talk about adrenaline! I think my poor mom was fearing for her life and mine, and our sportive ranger was suddenly very quiet and busy cranking the steering wheel. One thing is for sure: this wasn’t planned. But we survived nonetheless. So on March 14 my mom and I will celebrate our “second birthday” from now on 
The rest of our Safari trip went really nicely (apart from the fact that the lions are kept from killing the visitors by something that looks like soldering wire… 
), we saw giraffes, zebras, antelopes (among them the national animal of South Africa, the Springbok, very beautiful maculation), gnus, ostriches… even a baby ostrich!! Too cute!
After the 3 hr game drive we had a nice lunch at the reserve, wrote into the guest book and I took a little swim in the pool (the upper one, not the lower one with crocodiles in it, as proposed by the ranger) there on this beautiful hot day. The pics with the red date on them were taken with Brians camera – Thanks Brian!
BTW this is… um… an unknown person, my mom and Brian
