The sounds of the African bush slowly began to wake my brother and me. The room we shared was small and quaint. Two twin beds hugged the wall. Nets hung from the ceiling and draped around the beds, keeping the bugs away. A slight bit of sunlight crept through the window as monkeys walked across the roof and the distant growls of leopards echoed throughout the camp. 

I wiped the remnants of sleep from my eyes and got out of bed. I opened the door to find the sun, beautiful and bright, coming over the African horizon. Orange and red danced across the sky like wildfire. I had never seen something so amazing, so spectacular. For a moment I forgot to breathe. How could I not fall in love with this place? A place where zebras came up to you while walking down the road and elephants grazed by the water. A place where the sun looked as if it was from another planet. How could such a place exist? Words could not honestly depict what I saw there. 

From the doorway, I could see how far the land stretched. A distant head of a giraffe poked above the trees. A cape buffalo stood to my right only a few hundred feet away. Of course, I didn’t notice it for quite some time; my senses were too overloaded to take everything in. But as soon as I saw the giant snorting animal, I turned to my brother and shoved him inside. We quickly slammed the door shut, and waited for the animal to walk away. 

“Wow,” I said softly to my brother.

He began to snort and laugh hysterically like the hyenas we had heard the night before and joked, “We almost died!”

After about an hour of laughter, we hoped it was safe to leave. We quickly ran around the building to find our parents’ room. After furiously knocking on their door for what seemed like forever, my father finally answered. We burst into their room and told them about our morning. How we heard the animals from our room, how the sun burned in the sky, and about how we were almost killed by a buffalo. We spoke so frantically that they could barely comprehend what we were telling them. This was an experience that I will never forget and will cherish throughout my life, even when I am old and gray.