I'm not really sure what day it is, or really where I am, but I know we've done some awesome stuff. For my own memory I'm going to recap this all as briefly as I can, though it's hard to briefly describe an African safari. On Thursday we had to leave the backpacker at 9am for our 12:15 flight to Joburg. We all said our goodbyes to Shannon, Shelby and Speach. Shannon even cried a little bit which broke our hearts, he ended up as kind of a big brother to us all. We asked Speach to play our fav songs for the last time on the hour ride to the airport, which in case I forget them was 'I will love you till time stands still' by Liquid Deep and 'Jezabelle'.
Once we arrived in Joburg we found our tour guide Goose (yes, as in Top Gun). Goose is a good looking Australian surfer type who absolutely refuses to wear shoes and walks everywhere barefoot. I know, I don't get it either.
We left straight from the airport headed to Kruger, a solid 6 hours away by bus. We made a few pitstops for food and potty, and I got dinner from a South African burger joint called Whimpy. I have seen these everywhere, kind of like the SA equivalent of Wendy's maybe. I ordered a veg burger and it was quite the surprise: the patty was potato, and about 3 bites in I finally found some colorful bits resembling a vegetable. And the fries were pathetic and unsalted. NEVER AGAIN. KFC is huge here, if I am forced to fast food again it will be that.
Now that I am here I have a newfound appreciation for Cape Town. It is so brown and flat here, and every few miles you find some random patch of fire burning the grassy nothing. According to Goose, "stuff just burns here," leaving whole patches of char. We saw a good deal of it in Kruger too, but more to come on that. However brown this place may be, the stars make up for it. Maybe it's just because of the change in hemisphere, or the lack of giant American city lights, but the stars here are indescribable. Though I know nothing about astronomy, even I can tell they are different. As soon as the sun goes down the bus rides get surreal, and I have found myself watching the foreign stars while listening to any live DMB album I have, which is apparently the perfect soundtrack.
During our time at Kruger we are staying at Timbavati resort, which is actually a fenced off area in the wilderness with a bunch of 2 person huts called rondawels. They are large round rooms with a bathroom and thatched roofs. It is probably the most amazing accomodation I have ever stayed at--that's one way to start off the tour. If we stayed in these the whole time it would be fine with me, they are so unique. Also even though it's fenced baboons, impala and wharthogs still find their way in. I never saw a wharthog but I was the first to point out multiple impala and monkeys.
And to imagine that at the time we thought this was awesome. Now having spent an entire 12+ hours on safari in Kruger, one of the most famous game reserves in the world, those no longer thrill me. Before even entering the real park we were freaking out over impala, wharthog, and zebra spottings. We left for the park at 8am in our open safari vehicles, and with the windchill it was frigid. We saw the basic animals mentioned, as well as ostrich and springboc (noms) up until about lunch. And as you may or may not know I have a new appreciation for birds afer my vertebrate zoology class last quarter and have been noticing "cool African birds" everywhere we go. My lovely James House group knows this well, and during the morning safari they would yell "bird, Natalie!" every time they spotted one. As annoying as that may have been, I saw some really interesting, colorful African birds. Most of these were hornbills, which we constantly refered to as Zazu after the Lion King. Acutally quite literally all the animals we saw we tried to refer to using their Lion King names or roles. It never got old.
After lunch we found an amazing herd of elephants grazing, and they started to make their way near the road to eat. We must have sat there for at least 20 minutes and taken probably a few hundred pictures each (all of which probably look exactly the same). There were even a few baby elephants in the group, which were too precious for words. We spotted some giraffe eating acacia and latex trees, which are such cool looking animals up close I'm still excited about it. Then from a distance we saw a white rhino, croccodile (yum), hippo, and water buffalo. So by midday, after 8 hours driving around Kruger we had seen 3 of the big 5: elephant, rhino, water buffalo, missing lion and leopard. But those were for sunset...
We stuck with our family of 9 from James House and went on a sunset safari soon after. The rest of the group went in a truck of 20, and we split off from them right after entering the park. Our driver was a man named Phillip, who was mellow but still constantly joking with us. As 9 lovely ladies we asked him to take us off roading, which surprisingly he did. We ended up on a 'closed, do not enter' dirt road a few minutes into Kruger watching the sunset. Then we stopped, and Phillip took a few pictures of us in and out of the car--all this after we had been warned we would not ever be let out of the car for fear of lions or other predators at sunset. Talk about an amazing photo op, we love Phillip. After that we are driving down this road when I say, "how cool would it be if a giraffe or something just popped up out of no where." And I swear to you not more than a minute later the road curves around and we stop dead because there is a GIGANTIC GIRAFFE STANDING RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD STARING AT US. There was a gigantic singular gasp from the entire car, and we immediately, simultaniously whip out our cameras. We sat there for a good 5+ minutes taking pictures of the giraffe frozen no more than 15 feet directly in front of us, with the African sunset off his right flank. Called it, right? Then we drive towards him and he akwardly mosies off to the side, then cautiously swings around to watch us pass. We named him Leonard, and he is still by far the best part of our safari. Thank God for off roading with Phillip.
The rest of the night was not as lucky. We never spotted any lions, which haven't been spotted for the last week. But there are only about 1,000 lions in a park about the size of New Jersey (or Isreal, or Wales), so the chances were slim. We did spot something called a serval that Phillip aptly described as a "baby leopard," which is apparently an incredibly rare cat to see. As are hienas, of which we saw probably 5 or 6. By the end of our freezing night out in Kruger we had even seen so many elephants (including countless babys) that we were jaded to the point of "ok, yep, elephant, moving on..." Never thought I would ever get tired of elephant sightings.
So although no lions, for one [loooong] day we had an amazing safari. Without a doubt everyone has to do this at least once in their life. A bunch of locals kept driving through in their everyday cars (since there are paved roads through the park which you follow), as if they were taking the family around Yellowstone or something. Can you imagine just going on safari for kicks during the weekend? Crazy thought.
Who needs Goose when you have Gilligan, eh Skipper?
ReplyDeleteDANGER ZONE!!!