Kruger National Park

Words can’t really describe how incredible our experience was at Kruger National Park. It was agreed upon that this past Sunday was perhaps the most stunning events any of us had done. We all got to see the ‘Big Five’ (Lion, Leopard, Elephant, White Rhinoceros, Buffalo) at least two times, which wasn’t anticipated in the slightest. There were many astonishing and spectacular moments at Kruger, but three individual occurrences seem to really stick out above the rest.
The first event was when we were driving along one of the main roads, not really expecting to see anything rare due to the terrain but then it hit us: we spotted a leopard right on the side of the rode and Ryan immediately hit the brakes. The leopard looked at us for a second or two, then immediately crouched down like it was about to pounce at our car. Locke, who was in the passenger side closest to the leopard, asserted to roll up our windows for the reason that it was going to strike through the car window. Instead, the leopard got up and walked right behind our car and into the woods, but we did manage to capture a picture of it (shown below).
The next incident was when we were driving along on our way out of the park, again not really expecting or looking for anything in particular, and saw a few elephants trotting along the side of the road so we stopped momentarily to take a few pictures. The next thing we knew, one of the elephants began charging up a hill towards our car. Ryan did the intelligent thing and began driving away before the elephant trampled us, despite the insistence of some to test the limits of our Nissan Tiida. As we got about 30 feet away (after slowly being chased away), another elephant came up on the road and tried to mess with the other elephant. After a ten second stare down and minor scuffle, they backed away from each other.
The last and probably most outrageous event was when a lion began stalking a pack of Wildebeests. The scene at first seemed to be something out of Planet Earth, with a lone female lion slowly creeping up on the pack, waiting for an opportunity to strike. We began watching and waiting for about 45 minutes to an hour for the lion to finally make a move, only to be recognized swiftly by the pack and spurned off. After acknowledging defeat, the female lion slowly walked off in the direction of all the cars that had been watching, but none of us thought that she would actually walk that close to all the vehicles. In a scene of mixed emotions, mainly comical, the female lion walked up in between 2 cars ahead of us to cross the road.

Currently, we have divided our main group into minor subsets focused on individual parts to make the whole system functional and fast track its completion. The bricks have been layed and pipe system connected. All that is left is to fill the compartments with the material. Our goal and belief is that we will have the Tshapasha slow sand filter operational sometime next week.