After ~10 hours of traveling, we made it for a night ride where we saw warthogs run out of their holes, and a honey badger that didn't give much hoot about us. The impala were plentiful setting the tone, but not much else graced us with it's nocturnal presence.
The other safari car that went out at the same time as us and traveled similar paths saw a bit more. This would be another theme. Guests carry conversations about what they saw that day as a nightly competition. We learned two lessons. First, the photos are always better on the other 4x4. Second, major safari sightings are like a drug: there are gateway animals like giraffes and elephants and serious animals like black rhino and leopards. The people that got into the nightly competitions would see one and then need to see them all. We happily stayed out of the fray. We couldn't be happier watching the elephants tear down trees and cross the street (pic below has so many babies!), or the giraffes that would watch us as intently as we would watch them. We were filled with adrenaline when we saw hippos on our "bush walk" (or maybe that was fear of being in such close proximity with the deadliest animal out there).
The bush walk deserves it's own paragraph. The lead of our perfectly single file line is a rifle carrying park ranger. He told us to never run if something chases you. Just stand still and look big. There were some exceptions to looking a charging beast in the eye, but the only notable exception about the running rule is hippos. Hippos don't have a need to show dominance. They prove it by killing anything between them and their water hole. Should we find ourselves at the mercy of a charging hippo, our guide instructed us to find a tree... and climb. We were scared, but our guide does this every day. Our fear was analogous to our disgust as our ranger picked up a huge elephant dropping and asked Jason to smell it. Apparently carnivorous dung is dangerous because it holds bad bacteria, but herbivores have dung with a lot of good enzymes and nutrition..especially elephants. This made a lot more sense when we watched the elephants eat tree branches ... straight. Both our fear and our disgust were out of place. Humans used to roam these lands just fine, and even used buffalo dung (an herbivore) as their flooring because of the nice, sweet smell!
We don't have any stories that "compete" with our fellow guests' stories. One of them was in a safari car that got charged by a black rhino. Another followed a roaring lion. Yet another found itself in the midst of a hunting pride. But, we certainly enjoyed hearing about them from all the interesting people on safari with us.
We saw a lot of animals both near & far and big & small. Jason's favorite was the black backed jackal. He is just so impressed that these little dogs survive so well despite limiting their procreation to one mate throughout their lives. So sweet! Jessica's favorite, shockingly, was not the sunbathing, water loving hippos. Instead, she found the elephants to be her favorite. Jason doesn't think this was a fair fight. She saw mostly baby elephants. Can't compare with that kind of cuteness!
Each of our daily adventures was capped with a cold night in our treehouse. With no insulation (or even walling in some places), we slept in the wilderness. It was cold. None of this was helped by the fact that we needed to arise before sunrise each morning. All the interesting animals do their feeding at night and come back to bed for the daytime. So, if we wanted to see anything, we had better be up early and stay up late.
After 4 awesome days, we started the long ride home through a gorgeous canyon and the South African countryside.
Off to the wine country!
Jason and Jessica
No comments:
Post a Comment