So I combined days 1 and 2 since day 1 is technically the day we arrive in SA and we won't arrive in time to do anything. Yesterday I arrived in Johannesburg Airport and was transported to a guesthouse in Pretoria. Pretoria is the capital of SA, and this is where we will met our guides and have orientation.
We slept when we arrived at the guest house, but today (day 2) we have orientation and then we are going to a lion park just outside of Pretoria. There I will get a chance to bottle feed some baby lions (hmmm wonder how similar it will be to bottle feeding baby raccoons?) and interact with some of the centers other big cats, including king cheetahs!
For those of you who don't know what a king cheetah is, you are missing out. King cheetahs are basically cheetahs that have a genetic quirk in their coat patterns. Instead of having the typical spots they have some spots that look to have blended together creating pseudo-stripes.
When first discovered it was thought that king cheetahs were an altogether new species but a genetic analysis later proved that they are indeed the same species. I guess you could think of it as the same concept as the white tiger, white tigers are Bengal tiger's who have the recessive gene for white coat pattern. In fact, all white tigers essentially come from the same white tiger who was bred to produce only white offspring. With the inbreeding and low genetic variability in cheetahs a genetic quirk such as this was bound to show up eventually.
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