Safari

Pleasure and Pain in South Africa: Safari

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SAFARI!
The unique joy of a trip to Africa is a big-game safari. Once for the adventurous who would go into the wilderness for months tracking big game to shoot, a modern safari is as sedentary and easy to do as an ocean cruise. And very costly. At South Africa's national parks, the elephants, lions etc. roam free. You are able to drive around in the vast parks on paved or gravel roads, looking for animals, for just $30 per person per day, with chalets running about $100 a night. If you do it this way, as we did in Addo Elephant Park, you will definitely see wildlife -- deer, elephants, giraffes. But you would have to be very lucky to see a carnivore this way, and you will surely destroy your rental car if the roads are gravel. Still, at least this gets you into the park at a reasonable cost. If you can splurge, costs are from $225 per person per night at the cheapest private lodge (with electricity, ensuite bathroom with hot shower, 3 meals a day and two 3-hour drives near sunrise and sunset). For better food and deluxe lodgings, the price can easily quadruple before you even blink. Still, after nearly two months of being cheap, we "splashed out" and had a 4 night safari.			Where the zebra roam...
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Both safari lodges we stayed at were in Timbavati private game park, which is a huge tract of land just west of the Kruger National Park with no internal fences, so the game roam freely. Within Timbavati there are at least a dozen private lodges such as Akeru or Gomo Gomo, each owning a portion (Akeru = ~2000 ha, G.G. = ~12000 ha). The guests at each lodge go for game drives on 10-passenger open Land Rovers, with a ranger with a rifle and a radio, and often a local bush tracker in front, to see animals. Unlike in the national parks, the rangers know where the animals tend to go, the trackers can find them in the bush with amazing skill, and the rangers are allowed to go off-road, using the heavily fortified front end of the Land Rover to bushwhack, knocking over trees up to 10-12 feet high in pursuit of big game. This sounds terrible but the effect of the Land Rover is probably comparable to two rhinos or three elephants walking the same path -- those beasts are very destructive.			Bullet-riddled welcome sign
Kerri the ranger at Akeru	Akeru tracker	Andre, ranger at Gomo Gomo	Tracker and his father
Land Rover ready to go	Just nice to go for a drive	Rough road ahead	And sometimes the animals walk right in front of you.
Snack time	Sharp-eyed tracker	Bushwhacking -- we are about to drive over the dead tree and the live tree behind it.
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There is a lot of "bush politics" as when, say, a lion is spotted on someone's property, all the rangers from each lodge try to negotiate to be allowed to enter that property to show their guests the sighting. The lodges in the south part of Timbavati are very coooperative and share nicely, but the northern lodge Gomo Gomo is quite stingy -- which they can afford to be since they have the best land, with much of the water (where the animals go to drink). So, for example, we were sitting about 5 m from a rhino in Gomo Gomo land when someone came on the radio and asked, has anyone seen the rhino that was around this morning -- our ranger did not reply, which seemed selfish to me. All the guests and all the reserves benefit if everyone sees the most animals they can.			Bush politics
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The first lodge we stayed at, Akeru, is beautiful inside and the food was amazing; we lounged in the "honeymoon suite" overlooking the watering hole and watched the warthogs wander by. After two days in which we probably gained two pounds each per day, and what delicious pounds those were, we went to Gomo Gomo, which has far inferior accommodation (plugged shower drain, two single beds instead of the luxurious king size four poster one, etc.) but was $150 per night cheaper and actually has a better location, on a beautiful river which is alive with wildlife all day long. Bottom line: if you are going to Timbavati for romance, a place like Akeru is excellent -- if you are going mostly to see the animals, Gomo Gomo is your best value in the park. Kerri the super-ranger at Akeru went to heroic lengths to take us to the best sightings throughout the park, and we are grateful for that, but it is just easier if you are in the right spot to start with. We were always amazed at how the rangers & trackers could figure out how to get back to the lodge, on twisty little bush roads that always look the same.
Impala at Akeru Lodge	Akeru	Akeru at dinnertime
Our bedroom in Akeru	A king size bed + a gossipy magazine = paradise	Romantic gas lighting (just enough electricity to recharge camera batteries)	Elephant in the parking lot at Gomo Gomo
At Gomo Gomo you can watch the rhinos, elephants, baboons and even sometimes lions from the riverside viewing deck.	Bringing the computer was good in the sense I could write my stories and organize the photos, but I also sometimes regretted not being completely away from technology.	Beautiful dinner setting at Gomo Gomo. Too bad the food was only average.	The bar at Gomo Gomo
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We started small, early in the trip with a visit to the Knysna elephant park, really a "petting zoo" of sorts, where we could feed and touch orphaned elephants who had been rescued from "culling" (lacking predators and now protected from hunting, there is an elephant population explosion in the game parks).			Knysna Elephant Park
Baby born in captivity	Fruit snacks	Wide open for lunch	Diana gets to pet the elephant
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Then off to Addo Elephant Park, which was great fun -- driving our own rental car through the many square kilometers of bush and meadows, we saw much more than we expected.
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Addo gate	Chalets at Addo	Quite luxurious	Driving at Addo
"Will we ever see any animals?" -- 5 minutes into the drive we were rewarded with a sighting of a whole elephant family.	Elephant crossing	Our arrival at this water hole in the little Ford scared away the warthogs and even the birds, but this bull elephant stomped in confidently, showing us he didn't care who we were, he was taking a bath!	Bull elephants have 5 legs.
	We parked for almost an hour watching this elephant family, the twins (rare -- only the third pair the park has had) frolicking in the field, the only sound the wind in the grass, the elephants chewing, and rumbling and trumpeting to each other occasionally. This was beautiful and idyllic.	Small, medium, large.	At sunset a huge herd of elephants gathered at the big watering hole; young males butting heads, matriarchs keeping everyone in line, a whole society.
Wrinkles	The next morning after a bit of rain, no one was out at all -- we saw only a few monkeys shivering in the dew. I suppose not even the elephants want to stand in the cold rain and hide under trees somewhere.	Vervet monkey	Vervet monkey
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The first night at Akeru, we got to see a pride of lions at sunset, which was exciting and then actually quite scary when they got up to go hunt and walked past us in the Land Rover - so close that Diana could have reached out and touched two of them as they passed by. For a moment I had visions of these being the last pictures in the camera when they found our half-digested bodies... But that is overly dramatic. The animals in the game park seem to see the Land Rover as a type of large and noisy animal, too large to hunt but not dangerous to them, and generally ignore it. The only risk is if you stand up or leave the vehicle, because then you are seen separately from it and might be a tasty snack. For this reason the trackers come back from their exposed front seat to sit with the rest of us when we are looking at leopards.		Lions lounging at sunset	Getting up to hunt...
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The next day was windy and cool, few animals to see, but that night was a good night for hunting. That night a mother leopard and her son killed an impala and we visited them at the kill in the morning. Males usually hunt alone after 1-2 years of age but this one is ~3 years old and still with his mother. Not docile like the stay-at-home human male, he was very aggressively protecting his kill, hissing and growling at us and standing up suddenly to approach the vehicle, from a distance of just 5 metres, telling us to back off. This was also quite alarming. The reason for his anger became obvious later in the afternoon when we returned to find Batman the dominant male leopard lounging contentedly after devouring most of the kill. He had forced the mother and son away from "their" kill, because as Big Leopard In Charge he had automatic rights to it in this territory.
Young male leopard protecting his kill	His mother	The remnants of the kill later in the day
Batman the dominant male after feasting	Batman	Batman the big cat
Another leopard, with an injured rear leg	Same moment, with the zoom lens	Proud leopard
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This behavior also happens with lions, and the Big Guy with the mane rarely actually hunts himself, just takes over the kills made by the female lions. (You should hear Diana's outrage at this!) That same windy night, a pride of lions had cleverly forced a herd of buffalo over a riverside cliff and made a big kill of 3 buffalo -- enough food for the 5 lions for a long time. The site was easy to find by looking for the buzzards, and once we got there, also easy to smell -- a day is plenty of time for the guts to rot and there was too much food for the lions to finish their plates. They were lolling around lazily like Dad after Thanksgiving dinner and we never did get a good look at the Big Guy's mane.
Buzzards waiting their turn	Post-prandial	Not dead, just digesting	Buffalo kill, not smelling fresh
Lord of the Flies	Thirsty after buffalo dinner		At night
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At Gomo Gomo, our Land Rover full of happy tourists was racing through the brush in hot pursuit of a fresh rhino sighting, everyone talking animatedly and laughing -- then suddenly as we rounded a sharp corner, we found ourselves against a riverbank, separating a herd of probably 15 elephants from their matriarch. She angrily trumpeted and stamped around in a quite intimidating display, and the rest of the elephants faced us in a solid wall of grey flesh -- quite unnerving and we wondered just what we had gotten ourselves into. Nothing to do but wait for them to calm down, and luckily the matriarch then got a strong urge to itch her flank, nearly knocking over a 20 foot tree in her enthusiastic scratching. Hilariously, a giraffe poked her curious head over the treetops, no doubt wondering what all the trumpeting was about. The elephants eventually wandered off, quite slowly, and we resumed our rhino pursuit. This rhino was also upset (tensions running high in that part of the forest!) and had just charged the last Land Rover to drop by, and apparently charged the next one after we left, but he just ignored us. The animals must want to be left in peace. Life is much better for the animals on a game park than the zoo -- they get to roam hundreds of square kilometers and live life nearly the way they would have done in the wild before, free of hunting and free to roam. The price they pay is putting up with the Land Rovers from 6-9 AM and 3-6 PM, on the days when they are unlucky enough to be spotted or tracked. They can hide and evade the humans too. Our best rhino sighting was actually two of them in an inaccessible field near the park perimeter fence as we roared away at 120 km/h on our way to the airport.
Angry matriarch	The rest of the herd	Trumpeting at us	Giraffe: what's going on here?
We eventually found the rhino		"In and out" wounds from the horn of another rhino in a long-ago battle	Birds keep the rhino free of ticks
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Personally I enjoyed the giraffes, so elegant and graceful, and inquisitive and gentle. Even the big old dark male was handsome in his way. They sleep 5-10 minutes at a time, almost always while standing up.		Sticking her tongue out at us. Look at her beautiful eyelashes.
Graceful	Trio!		Knock-kneed child
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The baboons were always an eerie sight reminiscent of humans. We got to hear them at night, mating with the males making a loud deep cry (apparently the female baboon buttocks become very swollen when she is fertile). Speaking of mating, apparently leopards only mate once every two years, and the act only lasts 15 seconds, but they repeat it every 5 minutes for 3 days!			Baboon scene
Baby on board		Jump!
Our rangers were full of tales of questionable authenticity, to say the least -- like the one about the Asian man in Kruger park who had his wife get out of the car and stand next to the lion for photos, "just a little closer, honey", and ended up videotaping his wife being eaten by the lion -- a story the ranger finished by saying "but now the lions are tired of Chinese food..."		We gained much respect for the Land Rover, with its powerful softly grumbling diesel engine which could pull us up steep riverbanks with that surging feeling you also get on horseback, its remarkably smooth and civilized ride, and its surprising ability to be used as a battering ram pushing over bushes and trees when we went off-roading. This seems awfully unfriendly to the environment but the vegetation in the game park already looks pretty rough thanks to the vast elephant herds, and the damage from a Land Rover is comparable to that from 2-3 elephants walking beside each other.
Cape Buffalo	Chameleon	The impala (small deer) have an interesting harem system. Some lucky males get to each run with an entire herd of females, any of whom he can impregnate during mating season. The leftover males who couldn't find the females congregate in their own bachelor herd -- a lot of horns in the field!
Bambi!	Sick deer with tetany and meningismus. Rangers sent someone back to shoot the poor deer and take blood samples (the buffalo and lions are catching bovine TB, and there is anthrax about as well)	Bachelors	Male impala (with horns) and his female harem
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We saw plenty of other wildlife...	Stork	Eagle	Yellow-billed something-or-other.
Dung beetle -- an elephant only digests 50% of its food so the dung has lots of nutrients left.	Hippos at Gomo Gomo	Kudu -- hunters love these horns	Ostriches.
Diana found a spider in her salad at Gomo Gomo -- luckily not one like this!	Tortoise!	Why did the warthogs cross the road?	Handsome warthog
A face only a mother could love.		From A to Zebra we saw it all...
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And even if we didn't see anything, it was just nice to be driving around in, essentially, a 4x4 convertible in the wild on sunny African mornings and evenings with fun fellow travellers...
Michiel and Nadine from Johannesburg -- lovely engagement ring!			Millipede!
Nadine glowing with happiness	Carole from Switzerland	Sunset in the Timbavati
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The safari was a magical and often exhilarating experience and we highly recommend it, especially for honeymooners or kids about 7-12 years. The best would be a safari in an area of wide-open plains where you can see the animals from far away. South Africa is an amazing tourist destination -- not only the finest views, beaches, mountains and forests, but excellent roads, delicious and reasonably priced food, friendly and welcoming English-speaking locals. All that and elephants and leopards too! We hope you have enjoyed this lengthy travelogue, describing our unique medical and tourist adventure as nearly newlyweds -- once in a lifetime, we think. As they say, "Go well"... Jacob and Diana		Happiness is a safari and a zoom lens
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