We had a wonderful time in Kruger Park this past week. We both remarked how different the
experience was from our other safaris.
First off, we drove ourselves.
That meant that Jay had to both keep his eyes on the road and out his
window – a challenge even for the best of drivers. Luckily the roads were great overall, and a lot of times we
came upon cars that were already stopped for animal sightings (Oh yeah, and Jay
is a fabulous driver with mad skills!).
The second way in which it was different is that we didn’t
have any kind of radio to help us locate animals. We would set out each day with an idea of which roads we
would try and then just take it all by chance. When you pay for a driver to take you on safari, the radio
is a huge part of the experience.
The driver knows exactly where the animals are and rushes you to the
next spot. We decided that we
probably saw as many animals in our two days exploring Masai Mara in Kenya
(with a paid safari driver) as we did in our four days exploring Kruger Park by
ourselves. It was just a different
kind of adventure.
The third way it was different was that we got to spend time
with some of the animals that we found.
We could back up or stay put as long as we wanted just to watch what they
were up to. One of our favorite
stops was to watch dung beetles at work.
Have you ever seen them?
Here is a video. It looks
like it’s in fast forward, but really they just move fast like that.
Did you see the one that flipped the other one away?! They’re crazy! They have a lot of dung to work with,
since every road we drove on had huge piles of elephant poo. Apparently elephants excrete 50% of
what they eat in a day!
Here are some elephants we spent time watching from a bridge
over the Oliphants river. We drove
past this bridge multiple times, but this was the only time we saw elephants
there. They were great to
watch. Those trunks are amazingly
utilitarian!
Another elephant we watched for a while was the one we got
stuck behind on one of the subsidiary roads. It was just us and him, and since we weren’t interested in
making him upset, we followed him at a snail’s pace for quite a while! This one was in musth which is when
male elephants become hyper-sexualized and aggressive. You know one is in musth if they
secrete urine as they walk and they are found alone. As mentioned, we weren’t interested in following too close.
The next day we got caught behind another elephant on our
way back to camp. We can tell you
from experience that elephants do not move quickly. The camps close their doors at 6:00 on the dot, so our only
relief was that we were behind a safari truck that was also headed to
camp. We were pretty sure they
wouldn’t shut the doors before that truck got in.
We found lots of things in the middle of the road,
actually. Here are some lionesses
that were taking a mid-morning nap before the guy in the white truck in the
right side of the picture almost ran over their tails…
And here is a wildabeest who posed for us.
We had the pleasure of signing up for a night drive at one
of the camps where we stayed. On
this kind of drive, people hold out spotlights and everyone looks for
reflections from animal eyes. If you
see some, you yell “stop” and then work on getting the animal in the
spotlight. On our drive we saw all
sorts of things – lots of springhares, night birds, a hippo, an elephant, and a
group of hyenas. The bush is quite
active at night. Here are the best
pictures we could muster (night drives are not for amateur photographers with dinky cameras like me!):
We were lucky to have found a water hole that was full of
giraffes and zebras one day in the park.
This giraffe decided we were his friends, and came over to hang out with
us. He was cool. Giraffe’s are quite gentle creatures,
but they’re still massive!
Our favorite find was this white rhino, whom we found on our
last day in the park. Here is a
picture:
We managed to find all of the big five (elephants, rhinos,
cape buffalo, lions, and leopards) on our trek. The leopard did not make it into the picture, and he was a
challenge to track down, but you’ll have to trust that we definitely saw him
cross the road and slink around in the tall grass before heading out of
view. We were both so excited when
we saw him that I wasn’t fast enough with the picture!
We also stayed in some wonderful places. Our favorite was a rest camp called
Oliphants. We had a little
bungalow with a kitchenette attached that looked right out on the river. Here was the view:
It was very peaceful to listen to the water. The hippos, who are night creatures,
have funny grunts when they graze (don’t
worry, there was an electric fence between us and them!).
All-in-all, Kruger was a great trip, and we have visions of
coming back one day. It certainly
was worth the effort!
