We are almost at the airport in Johannesburg, where we will be flying to Nelson Mandela's childhood home in Quno. Tomorrow, we'll get into mini-buses and drive down bumpy roads and riverbeds to get to the tiny traditional village of Bulungula where we will be almost completely off the grid for a few days. There are solar panels for a little electricity, and a few solar showers and composting toilets. We will be staying in traditional thatched roundhouses right on the shore of the Indian Ocean. It will be amazing, but don't worry if you can't get in touch. I'm not sure if we'll be able to update the blog for a few days after tonight, but we will try.
Saturday, April 29, 2017
Trees and plants
This area of South Africa is very grassy, as you can see in lots of the photos I've posted. There are some spectacular trees here, amidst the scrub. We had the chance to see a 400-500 year old baobab tree, with a trunk that must be 100 feet around, at least. I've got several photos I'm posting here. There's also a couple photos of two huge fig trees.
Birds
There are a number of dead trees in the park, because elephants really like the taste of bark, and sometimes they strip too much from a particular tree and it dies. Birds then move in, and some of these dead trees have perches that are quite popular; you can tell because those favored spots are stained pure white. The photo here with the large birds in a dead tree features large maribou storks. The large number of birds in the field are also maribou starks out eating the giant african crickets (really, these crickets are the size of plums!). We could hear the crickets singing around us as we watched the storks.
Hippos and Crocs
It's hard to tell but one photo here is of the nose ridge of a hippo in the water, and the other is a croc sunning on the shore
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)