Here's some photos from the very small country of Swaziland. It's on the far edge of South Africa and also borders Mozambique. It's only 120 miles across, so it's pretty difficult to spend too much time here, but it's worth a visit if you're in the area. People are friendly and it has some nice natural scenery and game parks. There's one really small one that I thought was neat where you can rent a mountain bike and cycle around the park. Obviously there's no dangerous predators in this park, but after being limited to a car jeep or truck on every other safari it was fun to be able to ride around uninhibited.
That being said, I came very close to wiping out pretty bad as a warthog darted across the path when I was cruising downhill!

Here's a bontebok antelope:


The traditional dance shows are popular among the tourists and the swazis alike (surprising to me, I thought it would be purely a tourist spectacle) and are a fun way to spend an hour. Lots of drums, singing, chanting, and quick moving feet.


The economy is primarily livestock based, so you'll see big herds of goats and cattle all around

curious how much time u spend in a year travelling vs home, u definitely get around

"curious how much time u spend in a year travelling vs home, u definitely get around"

I'd say that in the last 6 years, which is when I've done the bulk of my traveling, I've been on the road for about half the time or maybe a little bit less. That doesn't include living in China for 5 months (English teaching) Australia for 10 months (bartending/poker) and Cambodia for 4 months (poker).

Ok time for some animal photos! I've got lots of these sitting around so here we go. Here are some lions from South Luangwa game reserve in Zambia. The nice thing about this park is you can get here with public transportation pretty easily, which usually isn't the case in Africa. Out of the 5 parks I did safari type stuff in, I think this one my favorite. The landscape was green and interesting, it's set up well, lots of animals obviously, it's not too expensive and the places you stay at outside the park have hippos that come in from the river at night and elephants that wander through camp sometimes if you're in the right season. We saw lots of lions!





A hippo roaming through camp. Whenever you go from your room to the main bar/restaurant area you had to flag down the security guy to escort you, just make extra sure you don't have any unwanted run ins with a hippo.

Spot the sloth! We went to a nature preserve in Costa Rica that had lots of cool birds but most importantly, sloths! They were up high in the canopy just chilling as always. It was the first time I'd ever seen a sloth IRL and it was surprising how green their coats are, as they're covered in algae (which I believe they have some sort symbiotic relationship with).

Here is the most important animal in the Himalayan world, the yak. These beasts do all of the really heavy lifting up and down the mountain. Just don't get in their way on the trail! Every once in a while you hear about a hiker getting pushed off the edge of a steep trail because they stood on the wrong side while trying to let the yaks pass. This one just chilling outside Gorak Shep, the last and highest lodge before you get to Everest Base Camp.



and some more hauling stuff up to EBC.

Today we have the monkeys of Bali. There are monkeys all over Bali of course, but there is a certain group of them that like to hang out around some of the more touristy places and steal whatever they can from unsuspecting victims. If you've got something hanging out from your backpack, you might as well kiss it goodbye (RIP bag of cashew nuts). These annoying little cretins will take anything they can get their grubby little hands on. I've seen them steal glasses off people's heads, soft drinks from someone's hands, and even a cell phone. I liked taking photos of them, but I'll keep my distance, tyvm.

on the prowl:


like father like son:


not so fast:

Today we the spotted cuscus, a weird ass marsupial located in the forests of West Papua Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. We were staying at a homestay in Raja Empat (Indonesia) and we were delighted by our daily visitor, which came by everyday around lunchtime to get some snacks. It's a pretty creepy looking animal with it's big bugging eyes and rat-like tail, certainly unique though.



He knocked the fruit out of this girls hand and grabbed her thumb, which was hilarious because she freaked out for a few seconds



We'd always laugh, because this thing's balls would hang so damn low.


Another very notable animal in W. Papua, the Birds of Paradise:

Here are some photos from 'cage diving' with the great whites just outside of Cape Town in South Africa. So it's not really diving, you just hop into the cage next to the boat with your wetsuit and mask, they chum the water and lure the sharks towards the cage. The visibility is poor, so you need the shark to be within a few feet of the cage, which isn't a problem. Sometimes the sharks will smack into the cage going after the bait, which really gets your blood flowing! So it was pretty cool seeing the massive sharks up so close, although I would certainly chalk it up to an experience that I'm happy to do once and only once. The boat ride is long and choppy and the water is ice cold! You can only stay in the cage a few minutes before your balls are going to freeze.


Here's the view from the top of the boat:



!!!

When I was doing an overland truck in Namibia we had a day off to do whatever we wanted. The afternoon beforehand they make you stop at a tour office and sell you hard on doing sandboarding or ATV'ing on the dunes, but the over the top sales pitch, the prices, and the whole super corny "THIS IS SO EXTREME!!" sales video had a bunch of us feeling a bit off put. About 10 of our group decided we'd just like to explore more of the coast on our own, so we rented two 4x4 trucks and headed off the next day. One of the cool things to see along the coast is a massive seal colony, which has over 100,000 seals. It's loud, dirty, smelly, but still quite the spectacle. It's actually pretty amusing how combative they are, always picking fights and barking at one another. It was a very memorable trip, but we couldn't wait to wash our clothes to get the stink off!

always arguing

a small section of the whole colony


baby seal

Some tarsiers in the Philippines. Bohol specifically. These guys are pretty shy and felt kinda bad about visiting them afterwards because they get all this attention during the day when they are supposed to be sleeping and it really stresses them out and hurts their span. Cool animals though. If you watch a video of them hunting at night on Youtube you wouldn't believe how quick they are compared to what you seeing during they day.

Some Rhinos at Etosha Nat'l Park in Namibia. How the guy on our truck spotted this one far off the road in the rain is beyond me!

bump for one of the best threads in my 15 years on this website and the source of all my desktop wallpapers!