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Published: July 17th 2007
Well, I returned from my weekend on safari with all limbs intact, and no lion bite-sized chunks taken out of me. It was really an amazing weekend, and I’m not sure that I can describe it all, but we’ll see how far I get. This is a story of the wilderness, of driving on the left-hand side of the road, and of the sunset drive from hell.
There were twelve of us UF students that decided to go on the safari. We arrived in Joburg on Thursday afternoon, and split up into our respective cars. I was in a car with my friends Nicole, Josh and Katie (who is also my roommate), and we were pretty lucky since I remembered to bring my FM Transmitter for my Ipod. So we had some rockin tunes. It was pretty hectic for the first hour or so of the drive, while Nicole got used to driving (manual) on the left-hand side of the road, and I can’t say that Josh and I were not a little afraid in the backseat. We stopped for dinner at a fast-food restaurant called “Steer”, and Josh later quipped: “Perhaps Nicole should have eaten at Steer, it might
have improved her ability to do so.” It was pretty hilarious. But the drive ended up taking us about 6 hours, when our professor assured us it would only take 4 or 5.
We stayed in a place called Elephant Walk, which is a small self-catering place with bungalows that is about 100 yards away from the Crocodile Bridge entrance to Kruger National Park. Kruger is a huge tract of land, actually bigger than the whole country of Israel. We were about 10-15 minutes away from the border with Mozambique. Elephant Walk was pretty nice, and we were occupying three of the cabins there. It was so dark out there that I saw more stars than I have ever seen in my entire life and you could actually see the Milky Way, or whatever it is that looks like the Milky Way. We were exhausted by the time we got there, so we just crashed.
Seven of us were signed up for a guided morning drive on Friday morning, so we headed down to meet our guide at 5am. Our guide, Dingaan (pronounced din-gah-nee) was an African who belonged to the Shangan tribe, and was very knowledgeable about
all the animals in the park. When we first got into the park, it was pitch black, and Dingaan had us using spotlights to look out into the bush for animals. We kept seeing these massive groups of glowing blue-green eyes and of course, us inexperienced, excited safari-ers were like “oh look! It’s a pride of lions with their cubs!” and he would say “no. It is impala.” Of course we were excited about the idea of impala, but he didn’t seem that enthusiastic about them. Later, we realized that impala are probably more plentiful than trees in Kruger. By the end of the trip, we were definitely tired of impala. The funny joke about them is that the markings on their tushies look like the McDonalds arches, so if lions are in the mood for a Big Mac…they just go find an impala.
Luckily, within twenty minutes of getting into the park, we had our first sighting from the Big 5. The Big 5 are the animals that were historically the most difficult and vicious to hunt (includes: Lion, Leopard, Buffalo, Elephant, and Rhinoceros). Sitting not 15 feet away from the road was a leopard, which is undeniably
the hardest animal to spot in the park. The leopard was sitting just like my parent’s cat does, with its big paws primly right in front of it as we stared at it for close to 30 seconds (long for a leopard sighting). After that, we saw two fully grown male lions lounging by the side of the road, looking much like my family does after Thanksgiving (read: food coma). Through the rest of the day we saw rhinos up close, had to stop the vehicle for a herd of elephants crossing the road, watched hippos and crocodiles lounge in the watering hole, and saw giraffes munching on trees. Day 1 was a success.
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laura... duh.
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GIRAFFEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE =)