Victoria Falls Day 2: Cheetah Walk, more of Victoria Falls, and Zambezi River Sunset Cruise.

Okay, listen. Africa could not get more amazing.

Today, I got to hang out with cheetahs. No joke. I got to sit on the ground next to cheetahs and pet them. They licked my hands. They purred like house cats. Then, I walked one like a dog through the bush. Some people want to swim with the dolphins; petting and interacting with cheetahs was like that for me!

I got to hang out with Lulu first. She is only 2 years old:

Then I got to be with Lillian, who is 3 years old:

If that wasn’t enough to make my day, check out this rainbow over Victoria Falls. There are 4 trails on the Zambia side of Vic Falls, and I have now hiked all of them! I am thinking of finding out how much it costs to ride an ultralight over the Falls to see them from the air.

But wait, there’s more! I went on a sunset cruise on the Zambezi River today. The Zambezi is the water that feeds Victoria Falls, and it flows all the way to the Indian Ocean. We got to see HIPPOS! Legit, real, wild hippos. The sunset was beautiful, too.

Oh, and I saw about 30 different monkeys today. They just walked past me on the path. No big deal. There was everything from infants with their mothers to adolescents jumping around in trees to full adults.

Seriously. Y’all need to come to Zambia. You all need to experience Camp LIFE because it is a life-changing experience for you and 10 orphans, and you all need to go to Victoria Falls because God’s creation here is just phenomenal.

By the way, for those who are interested in animal rights: the cheetahs that I hung out with were rescued from zoos in South Africa. The company who keeps them has 9 cheetahs total: 5 males that have been transitioned away from human exposure, 1 male that is used in the Cheetah Walk but was too grumpy today for interaction, and 3 females that I interacted with today.

The plan for the 9 cheetahs is to transition them into a huge game farm that is 400m x 400m. They will live and breed there, and their cubs will be transitioned into the wild to repopulate the cheetah population. There are less than 10,000 cheetahs in the wild today, and under 100 in Zambia, so this organization is committed to changing that.