{"id":7654,"date":"2014-08-30T20:56:54","date_gmt":"2014-08-31T03:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/?p=7654"},"modified":"2015-09-29T22:39:29","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T05:39:29","slug":"end-of-the-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2014\/08\/30\/end-of-the-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"End of the Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a scene in Planet Earth<\/a> that shows a wild dog hunt<\/a>, and David Attenborough notes how rare it is to be able to see these endangered animals hunting. Today was my last game drive after a month on safari, and it was spent watching wild dogs hunting. Had I seen wild dogs hunting at the beginning of the safari I would not have appreciated how special a sight it was, but after all of the experiences in Africa, finishing the journey watching such a rare event was a perfect ending to an extraordinary adventure.<\/p>\n

“Safari” is actually a Swahili word meaning “long journey”, so after 33 wonderful days of game drives my long journey has come to its end. 33 days ago<\/a> I hardly knew the names of any animals here. Today I’m leaving knowing how to recognize several birds by their calls, how to watch impala to see if a predator is nearby, and what a cheetah’s behavior will be when hunting. I’ve seen a lion defending its kill from hyenas<\/a>, thousands upon thousands of migrating wildebeest<\/a>, leopards prowling a few feet from the vehicle<\/a>, and dozens of other mind-blowing sights. “Luck” doesn’t seem to begin to describe how fortunate I’ve been, both during the trip and to have been given the opportunity to do a trip like this one.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow starts a new phase of the trip, and I’ll be getting up early to catch a flight to Cape Town where I’ll meet Audrey and start the next portion of the odyssey. While the game drives are over, in a couple of days there will be sharks…<\/p>\n

\"Wild<\/p>\n

Wild dog (also called painted wolf) after dining on impala. We got to spend a good deal of time with them before and after their hunt, although the heavy brush and speed which they moved when hunting made pictures tough, so unfortunately I didn’t do a great job of capturing the experience.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a scene in Planet Earth that shows a wild dog hunt, and David Attenborough notes how rare it is to be able to see these endangered animals hunting. Today was my last game drive after a month on safari, and it was spent watching wild dogs hunting. Had I seen wild dogs hunting … Continue reading “End of the Journey”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,30,21],"class_list":["post-7654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-2014-world-tour","tag-photography","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7654"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7665,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7654\/revisions\/7665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}