Safari!!

We woke up early this morning for a 5:30 am departure through Kruger Park and on back to Johannesburg.  Our safari time was absolutely wonderful!  Unfortunately we had very poor access to the internet, otherwise we’d have been posting updates and photos along the way.  But we have internet now, so we’ll start posting some of our experiences.

Yesterday we were out the gate to our camp at 6:00am when it opened.  We are the ones in the zoo here, living behind fences and being out only with an armed ranger.  The gates to the camps are closed overnight, and because one of the best game viewing times is at sunrise, there are lines of jeeps and cars waiting for the 6:00am gate opening.  We were first in line, in our giant safari jeep (it fit all of us inside it!).  Our guide, Edward, was the head ranger at the Satara Camp, where we stayed.  The region of Kruger Park where we were was mostly grassy and scrubby, with small trees and bushes dotting the gold and green fields of grasses.  Small rivers and ravines ran through, and there were some occasional ponds or small lakes where we spotted hippos and crocodiles.  The hippos, by the way, stay mostly submerged during the day, so what we spotted was actually their nostrils above the water.  Every now and then, we’d see the tops of their heads or even their eye ridges.  The crocodiles look like large logs, but once you know how to see them, we saw them in lots of places.

Our first major find yesterday was a pride of lions.  We were out the gate as the sun was barely rising, and suddenly, from the back of the jeep came a shout, and then a lot of squeals.  Morganne and Lily had spotted lions!  Lions are so elusive, and they are very sensitive to sound, so often they move back from the roads early in the morning.  But we were the first vehicle out of the park, and they were still near the road.  There were two males, with big dark manes, and at least three females.  One of the males stood up as we drove up, clearly aware of us, and he paced and watched us.  Behind us, other jeeps and cars stopped to see the lions as well, until soon we had a pile up of vehicles along the road.  The lions slowly got up and walked away, obviously not liking the crowd.  We were really lucky, as such a clear and close lion sighting is rare.  In fact, later in the day, we came to an area where our ranger had heard there had been lions, and we stopped in the jeep, waiting quietly, until our guides pointed out a lion not 15 feet from us deep in the grass.  We stared into the grass for 5 minutes, and none but our guide could see the lion until he got up and walked away from us into the grass.  Even then we could barely catch glimpses of the top of his head, which was just slightly darker then the surrounding grass.  Amazing!

It is really something wonderful to be driving around in the open air, in the glorious nature, and seeing these beautiful wild animals in their natural habitat.  We could quickly see that some animals were usually near other ones, like, for example, when we saw a group of zebras, which we did a lot, we would often see a group of wildebeests nearby.  Our guide told us that zebras like to eat the tops of the tall grasses, while wildebeests like to eat the grasses down near the roots, so they stay close to each other so they each get what they like to eat.   Zebras, by the way, are smaller than they might seem.  They are in small groups of 3-7 or so, and they are a little skittish.  More than once, our jeep seemed to scare the into trotting back further away from us.  If one startled, the others joined in, and there they were off running away.  Wildebeests, on the other hand, were much more solid.  They are very large, and front heavy like a moose, although not that large.  Wildebeests have long scraggly black fur and the hint of stripes on their sides.  They also have large horns that look like they could be dangerous although wildebeests pretty much stay away from humans.  Some we saw in fairly large groups while others were solitary.  We saw so many that it got to be a joke with us, “oh hey, just another wildebeest.”

Giraffes also are in small groups.  They really like to eat the acacia trees that dot the plains.  Acacias have long thorns, but the giraffes carefully eat around the thorns, using their thick saliva so they don’t get stuck.  We saw several family groups of giraffes, including, once, a small baby who was only weeks old and still wobbly on his feet.  We spooked the baby and he tried to run off, but really mostly succeeded in looking like he was trying to run on ice, with his feet skittering out from under him.  It was adorable.  Giraffes are very calm, and really quite curious.  I think they watched us at least as much as we watched them.

Another of our great sightings yesterday was a leopard.  We were out at sunset hoping to spot a leopard, and our ranger guide took us to an area where one was known to have recently given birth to cubs.  We drove way out to the area, and sat quietly looking for the leopard.  We waited and watched,  We hauled out the spotlights as it got duskier.  We didn’t see a thing.  Then the ranger made a whooping/thumping sound.  He said it was a leopard call.  And sure enough, ahead of us on the road, the leopard came out of the grass and crossed the road going to check on her cubs!  She was large, and while she was walking slowly, she was clearly aware of us and very protective.  Her legs were massive and bulging with muscles.  Her spots rippled as she walked.  When she was in the grass on the other side, she had to walk closer to us to get to her den, so we followed her with our spotlights.  But she was well-hidden in the grass, and we only managed to see occasional flicks of her tail or glimpses of her ears through the long grass. 

In the dark on the way back to camp, we saw several small African wildcats, including one that spooked so much that it couldn’t decide whether to run to the grass on the right or on the left, so it kept running in front of us down the middle of the road.  We tried turning off our lights, or stopping, but it kept running.  Finally we stopped and turned off all our lights, and when we put them back on, the cat was safe in the grass.  These little cats were really interesting, as they looked about the same size and shape as an average housecat.  Their faces looked like a normal cat as well.  But their tails were longer and ringed, and their fur was woolier than a housecat.  We did get to see a particularly curious one, who sat by the side of the road and looked at us appraisingly for minutes.   

We had some amazing elephant sightings, both herds of females with juveniles (and babies!), and giant lone bull elephants.  We did see some really playful young elephants, poking each other with their trunks from behind, tussling, throwing grass at each other.  I swear we could almost see them smiling and laughing!  We also saw a baby that was so tiny he barely stood above the grass.  We waited a long time in hopes of getting a better view of the baby, but we mostly just got to see his ears flap every now and then, or a brief glimpse of him nursing from his mom.  One particular heard kept coming slowly closer to us, as one adult found a nice delicious dead tree about 10 feet from the road, and as she started breaking off branches against her tusks and then stripping the bark off the pieces in her mouth, others came to get some of the treats too.  Soon we had a group of about 5 elephants so close to us that we could smell them (they smell like the barnyard displays at the state fair). 

The animals we saw the most of were probably impalas.  There are millions in the park as they are an essential food source to most of the predators.  These deer and about the size of the white-tailed deer back home, but with small straight horns, and a big white rear with a set of black lines that look like the large letter ‘M’ running up under their tails.  They are mostly in very large herds of hundreds of impalas, although we saw some smaller groups as well. 

The other most frequent animal we saw were birds.  The birds here are glorious!  Some with iridescent colors, or shocking blue bellies.  We saw hundreds of giant storks, and we even saw the very endangered southern hornbills, which are bigger than wild turkeys, stark black, with bulging bright orange throats.  Like turkeys, they don’t fly.  At one point, we saw tens of thousands if not more of tiny little birds that were swarming and swooping at sunset.  It was like moving art in the sky all around us!

We did not see the so-called Big Five.  The one we missed was the rhino, although we saw the others (leopard, lion, buffalo, elephant, and rhino).  I don’t think any of us are too disappointed, though, as this has been an amazing experience all around!  We saw so many animals not mentioned here, although also spectacular and exciting.  We could easily spend weeks in this park and still not be finished.