Mike McGoldrick - Philadephia Founders: Africa! Day 15

Woke around 4:15 am. Accidentally forgot to set clock back an hour. Got up and showered and everything. Was wondering why no one else was up getting ready yet, then it hit me so I went back to sleep for an hour.

Had some tea then we are heading out to walk with lions today. Big day ahead. We are going to a lion rescue/orphanage, then to bungee jump, then to see Victoria Falls.

The Lion Walk was really cool. We went on a long trail with a couple of cubs. We got to pet and take a ton of pictures with them. Pretty feisty little dudes. You have to be very careful and aggressive with controlling them. Using a stick, we had to divert their attention pretty often. The two we walked with were 8 month olds, Sengwa & Saruchi. After the walk, we went back to the center and had an awesome breakfast. They had BACON!! The Europeans next to me didn't eat their bacon so I took it off their plate. Silly buggers....

Here's a video that we purchased of our day with the lions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etMrp4JOm14&feature=plcp

Now it's time to head to the Zambezi bridge for bungee jumping. This jump is the 4th highest in the world at 110 meters long. There wasn't much to it really. Walk toward the end of the bridge, pay $100, sign a piece of paper and 20 min. later I was next in line to jump. I can't explain how exciting this was. Way more thrilling to me than sky diving.

Vid of the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpqvYTUP8Kw&feature=context-chv

Matt and Christina went first. We were the only three of 9 to bungee. The others chose to do the gorge swing and zip line. Both looked pretty incredible.

After we were doing with the rec activities we made our way over the Victoria Falls National Park. I had a delicious cashew chicken salad then headed into the park. The park follows all long the south rim of the falls. Absolutely incredible. It's the wet season so there was mist everywhere. You were unable to see the bottom of the falls. There is so much water running down.

Victoria Falls is known as Masi-ao-Tunya (The Smoke That Thunders). Around 107m high, 1731m long with a water flow of 1,000 cubic meters per second. Finished up in the park after several cool pictures and playing in the spray. Now heading back to Garth and Trish's house.

On the way back we stopped and bought several types of local beers. Tonight we are having a cookout. They make you pay a deposit on the glass bottles here so they are recycled.

Had some time for a workout once I returned.

5 sets @ 90-95%:
2:00 clock
Run 75m
5 muscleups
10 burpees
Run 75
*In remaining time during 2:00 perform AMRAP double unders
Rest 2:00

Felt pretty good. All movements UB excepty du's. Broke once per round. Good breathing work.

After training, Matt, Doug, Garth, Luke(Garth's son), Mike, and I all played some cricket for a bit. REALLY fun game! Luke is a tough kid. He was diving all over the place. Super athletic.

Crazy story about Luke. About 3 months ago he and his family were driving back from a cricket tournament. Somehow the sliding door in the van they were in came open and Luke fell out of the car going 90 km/h (roughly 56 miles per hour). They slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car to see if he was even alive. He was covered head to toe in blood and scrapes but was fine. No broken bones or anything! Talk about a miracle. Tough, tough kid.

The BBQ with the Pritchards was great. Had some good laughs and shared stories. We learned a little about how the Zimbabwe dollar lost it's value do to inflation. Each year they would continue to print more and more money. I have a couple of Trillion dollar bills they let me have. It's silly. The dollar became so inflated due to corruption in the gov't that they just had to keep printing larger and larger bills. Trish was telling us how they would go to a restaurant to buy dinner and have to bring bags of cash.

They finally retired the Zimbabwe dollar and started using the U.S. dollar a few years ago.