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Published: April 2nd 2014
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After a long day of travel from Cape Town, we arrived in Nelspruit around 9 oclock at night, all of us completely drained from the busy week that preceded and not fully recovered from the mix of beer and colored rice powders ingested at the HoliOne Festival the night before our departure. I’m convinced this rice powder (though advertised as completely organic and harmless) gave us all colds as we spent the next several days sneezing and coughing as a quartet. Despite this, we were all excited to be back in the bush and to spend some more time observing the African wildlife. Though the safaris in the Okavango and the Chobe were incredible, there’s still more to see… a lot more to see.
The owner of the homely hostel we stayed at in Nelspruit would be our safari guide, a jolly South African named Paul, for the 3 day camping trip. The five of us departed for the park at 6 am that morning and within two hours we were sitting beside lions, my first rendezvous with any of the big cats. This first encounter was a rather obscured view but what really stands out from this moment early
in our trip was how the Kruger safari experience is completely contrary in style to the Okavango mokoro safari we had had a few weeks earlier. Instead of navigating in fragile, unbalanced, motorless boats and on foot amongst the surrounding animals, we were now in an SUV on a paved road and amongst a traffic jam of cars clamoring for a view of the cats. We all kind of rolled our eyes at this moment, but it would not be a sign of the things to come as the park is so vast that once we were a bit further within the park we had most wildlife encounters to ourselves or with just another car or two sharing the view.
For the next 48 hours, we explored the park with Paul’s experienced lead and we were all completely content with our wildlife sightings. We saw four of the “Big Five” animals, dubbed so for the level of danger involved in hunting them and comprised of the elephant, water buffalo, rhinoceros, lion and leopard. The exception in our viewing was the leopard, the rarest and most elusive of these 5 and so we certainly aren’t disappointed in that. Aside from
them being hard to spot even if you are standing right next to one, the park is larger than many small countries and there are only 1500 leopards estimated to be living there… so spotting one is not an easy task.
Along with the aforementioned elephants, buffalo, rhinos and lions, we also saw a slew of other animals the bush has to offer including rare birds and snakes, many types of bucks and antelopes, hippos, crocs, giraffes, ostrich, zebras and wildebeests. Here’s a list of my most enrapturing moments of the trip:
· having a huge bull elephant, dwarfing our SUV, cross the road 2 meters in front of our car.
· during a night drive, we found a young male lion and his three lionesses hunting for food… the male walked right beside our car for a long while, staring us in the eye every few steps, while the three females walked with an empowering hunger in their stride in the grass just a few feet off the road
· watching four white rhinos grazing at sunset
Other moments are no less amazing, but these stand out as grander gifts of the bush.
After two nights of camping comfortably under the Milky Way in enclosed campgrounds within the park and witnessing the plethora of animals Kruger had on display, we opted for a third-day day-trip up to nearby Blyde Canyon, the largest green canyon in the world. Between Kruger and Blyde however, we made a stop at a wildlife rehab center called Moholoholo, where injured, sick or nuisance animals outside the national park area are brought in hopes of rehabilitation and release. So many of the animals brought here suffer from horrendous injuries brought on by farmers’ snares and bear trap type contraptions, inflicted to prevent them from hunting any livestock. Unfortunately, these animals, like others around the globe, are most threatened by habitat loss, which has seen their habitat shrink from nearly the entire continent to small conservation pockets. Visiting Moholoholo, was both an enlightening and enchanting experience as we were educated on the severity of this issue and also had the chance to see many rare animals up close, including lions, leopards, cheetahs, African wild dogs and so on, each animal remarkably beautiful in its own way.
Our day continued up into the mountains with numerous stops at vistas of
the canyon and the surrounding areas, unique in how its steep walls are sheathed in green. Much of this drive reminded me of drives in the Southwest, with cool rock formations and colors along the way. We took our time exploring each spot and carried on only when we were content with the view imprinted on our minds. At an altitude well over 2000 meters, the crisp air was a blessing compared with the weighing heat of the prior days. The first view point we came to was really the motivation for coming all the way up here – a cliff’s edge vista staring into Blyde Canyon and the Blyde River at its basin. A beautiful and lush gash in the earth and such a completely different landscape from the bush just a short drive away. After the canyon, we continued to several waterfalls, each set in the perfect frame for envisioning hoards of gold panners and prospectors, just as it was in times past. As we departed the last of the view points, beginning our descent from the mountains, we all felt entirely content with what was a great safari top to bottom.
With the time
on this Africa trip ever so precious and dwindling down, the following morning we wasted no time, and caught a local
chapa (an overcrowded minibus) from Nelspruit to Maputo to round off the last days of our trip with some R&R in Mozambique.
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John Erwin
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Many Great Memories
This will have been a trip of many fine memories and unique sightings of wildlife and life in general. Blyde canyon seems in many ways like Waimea on Kauai