Boy am I glad I went to bed early. After finishing dinner and cleaning up I went up to my room and unpacked. I also got my mosquito net hung up and properly draped around my bed. Megan was in her room too so I decided to just turn my lights out and read until I fell asleep around 10 pm. I was sleeping pretty good until around 1:30 when I woke from a dream where I couldn't get a low battery noise to stop, like a smoke detector. After I opened my eyes I realized it was coming from outside. I have no clue if it was a insect or animal. It just knew it wasn't the frogs and geckos that made a racket before I fell asleep. The noise was driving me crazy. I had remembered to pack a pair of ear plugs; however, they weren't enough to block the atrocious noise that seemed to be on my window sill. Fortunately Dan convinced me to purchase a pair of Bose noise reduction earphones which I received right before my trip. I grabbed them, turned on the noise reduction switch, and placed them over my plugged ears. Ahhh- the painful noise was gone. I quickly fell back to sleep.
The sleep lasted until about 5 am when the sun started coming up and the birds started chirping. There are 894 recorded birds in the country which is smaller than West Virginia. It sounded like at least 1/3 of the birds were outside my window. I decided to go ahead and get up to go to the bathroom which is downstair since it was light out. The walk to the stairs is impossible without a flashlight and just a little bit scary. The entire house is open air so there is no telling what could have flown or crawled in at any given time.
After crawling back in bed I couldn't get back to sleep. We didn't need to be up and downstairs until 6:30 so I figured I'd catch up on some email, games, etc since there is wifi at the farm. I grabbed my iPad and tried to connect but noticed the wifi connection wasn't working like the previous evening. I jumped up to turn the lights on and discovered they weren't working either. Now when go on safaris in southern Africa it is very common for the camps to turn off the generators at night and not turn them back on until early morning. This was my first thought but wondered why they didn't warn me. At least I still had some battery life on my iPad so I just read until it was time to go to breakfast. Later I learned the power was out because of the storms and that it was rare for them to go out. Good to know for the future. Now if there was only a way to shut up all the noisy creatures outside.
