Living the life!

It seems we have somehow landed in another world.  We are greeted at the van with a valet to take our bags and given lime and seltzer refresher and a towel to clean off the grime of travel.  We walked down to get our first look at the Zambezi River.  We are told that the land across the river is part of a game preserve and Lo! and Behold!  Janet spots our first hippo.  Unfortunately, none of us have brought binoculars, but we can look through Janet's camera lens and can clearly see the familiar outline of the hippo.

 

A short walk around the property reveals lots of hippo prints in the mud by a pond directly behind the thatched roofed "hut" that we are going to be living in.  The skeleton keys that we have been given also have a flashlight on the chain- turns out it gets awful dark at night....so dark we can see the Milky Way and a whole host of stars that we cannot see at home.  Thanks to Suzanne's Star Gazer app, we are able to locate the Southern Cross, only visible in the Southern Hemisphere, very cool!

The rooms at the Lodge are beautiful, quite the change from the bunks in the girls dorm at the House of Moses.  Each night they let down the mosquito netting and turn down the blankets.  The food is artfully displayed, breakfast lunch and dinner and we discover that many of us have a "food setting" on our cameras.

We watch "Zambian TV" each night before we go to bed (a campfire), and one night are treated to a traditional Zambian dinner- N'shima, beef stew, and some vegetable dishes that will remain unnamed in the blog.  The true adventurers in the group did not use utensils, but made balls with the N'shima and made a depression in the center to use as a scoop for the food.  Worked for me!   There was even entertainment, a guitarist, who also played the traditional African drums (NOT Masters like my friend Maxwell Kofi Donkor, but I joined them for a song).  Janet was somehow able to work her Charleston in as she danced in front of the fire (Janet has worked the Charleston in at the Milk and Medicine stop and even at the Bill and Betty Bryant House (the BBB or Bed Bath and Beyond as I call it).  Janet is changing the world one crazy step at a time.