Savannah Safari!

Hey guys!

I was just in Namibia, a small country on the Southwest coast of Africa. Namibia has the least people in all of Africa, mostly because the Namib and Kalahari deserts take up a lot of the country, and the desert is not a great place to live. While I was there, I went on a safari in Etosha National Park! It was amazing. I saw so many cool animals!

Here are some of the animals I saw:

The animal I saw the most of was a Springbok, which is a kind of gazelle. They look like little deer with black stripes on their sides. Sometimes, the boy springbok will try and impress the girl springbok by jumping really high, which is funny to see because they look like they’re on a trampoline. Another cool thing about springbok is that they get all the water they need from the plants they eat, so when it gets really hot and dry in the desert and water is hard to find, they have no trouble because they can eat and “drink” at the same time!

We saw another kind of gazelle called an Oryx, which looks just like a springbok, except it has gray fur with long, straight black antlers. I saw another animal that looked like a really tiny springbok, or a baby deer. This animal was called a Dik-Dik, and they are the tiniest antelope. Even when they are full grown they are still not much bigger than a little dog!

I also saw a lot of zebra! I bet you all know what a zebra is (I’ll give you a hint: it looks like a black-and-white striped horse), but did you know that there are two kinds of zebra? There is a Grevy’s zebra, which is shorter, a little smaller and looks like a donkey, and then there is the plains zebra, which looks bigger and more like a horse. Despite looking a little different, both these kinds of zebra play together all the time! The zebra and the springbok like to hang out and eat their plants together, too.

My favorite animal that we saw was a giraffe. Giraffes are the tallest land animals in the world! They like to hang out in groups of four or five and eat the leaves up at the tops of trees. It is really funny to see a giraffe drinking at the watering hole, because they are so tall they have to bend their legs in a really weird direction to reach the water! They take their front legs and move them far over to each side of their bodies, almost like a front-leg split. Then, they bend their long necks down and take their drink.

On our first day driving through the savannah, we saw a herd of elephants! There were about 10 big, adult elephants and 3 or 4 babies! They were all gathered around the watering hole drinking and playing in the water. Elephants can live for over 70 years, which is a very long time for an animal!

At night, we camped in tents. There was a watering hole near our camp site, so we went to see what animals came to drink at night. That night, just at sunset, we saw a mom and baby rhinoceros! There are black and white rhinoceroses in Africa, but the black rhinoceroses are endangered. Endangered means there are not very many of them left in the world. We saw the bigger, more common type of rhinoceros, the white rhinoceros.

The coolest animal we saw is sometimes called the King of the Jungle. Can you guess what it was? If you guessed a lion, you’re right! We saw three lions, two males and a female. They are very hard to spot in the savannah, because the sun gets very hot and they like to relax under shady trees. It is easiest to find them in the morning, when it is still cool and they can wake up and get a drink of water, or at night, when they wake up from their shady naps. If you have cats at home, you know how they like to sleep. Lions sleep for 12-14 hours every day. That’s over half the day!

It was really fun to go on safari. Namibia is a great country! On the way back to the ship from our safari, we stopped at a wood-carving market to buy crafts that the Namibian people made. I got a wooden giraffe statue to remind me of my favorite safari animal.

I’m on my way to India right now! I’ll tell you more about it after I’ve gotten there- next you can look for my stories from South Africa!