Don’t stall by the elephants!

The heat was making us restless. Two hours on the trail and hardly more than a common impala to be seen. With the windows down we couldn’t keep the air conditioning on, and the dust was slowly coating the interior of the car as well as our clothes. We complained to the guide. Why were we paying for someone to drive us around when we weren’t seeing anything?! He slowed the jeep and seemed to consider, then quickly veered off the road and into the bush. No trail, no tracks, just our 4×4 against the ancient wild terrain of South Africa. And still no animals! And I had to go… I whispered my request over the guide’s shoulder and he slowed to a stop. Right outside the car?!?! No way! He agreed to take me around behind a tree about 10 meters away. Just as I had attained privacy, I heard a whisper. “Back to the jeep. Slowly!” What?! “Shhh. GO NOW!!!” Just then I saw it – the lion. Creeping toward us through the grass… on the hunt. I bolted, the guide behind me with his rifle. He sent a backwards shot toward the lioness, trying to slow her as she raced toward us. I couldn’t look back, and as I reached the car I leaped through the open door. The guide was a few paces behind, but rather than following me through the door, he slammed into it, forcing it shut. Blood splattered against the glass, and he slowly sank…

Wait wait wait… something’s wrong with this story. Oh right – you shouldn’t drive off the trail. And if you have to go, you’re so out of luck until the next rest area. And one last thing – you’re not supposed to get eaten by lions!!! I know being restricted to your closed-door vehicle while exploring a national park is a difficult thing to imagine, but unless you want to end up like this hopeless group of safari-ers in the movie Prey (described above), you follow the easy rule called “Don’t be  f***in’ stupid!”

As you can read, I wasn’t eaten by lions in Kruger National Park – this was mostly due to my native South African guide who was crucial in teaching me basic survival skills. But I did have a few of my own experiences that taught me plenty, for example:

1. Don’t get out of the car. Or at least, don’t get out when you’re not supposed to, which is most of the time. (My experience staying inside the car was a very positive one.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. If you do get out, close the window, or the vervet monkeys will jump in and steal your pretzels. (My experience tells me you can’t get any more pretzels inside the park!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Don’t stall by the elephants.  (Luckily you can’t actually stall when you’re passenger-seat driving, but that doesn’t make it less stressful.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let me explain a bit about this last rule. Elephants are by far the scariest animals in the park. I think I had a greater fear of stalling by the elephants than an actual likelihood of doing so, mainly because I was so fearful of stalling by the elephants that I made Mike drive most of the time, just in case we came across any elephants. And come across we did. There are approximately 3,800 elephants in Kruger, and due to the late dry season, we drove past about 3,000 of them next to the road… in the road… crossing the road… crossing back across the road. I swear those elephants just wait for us to approach and then figure it must be time to cross the road again. Great picture opportunities, most definitely, but absolutely terrifying!! Especially after watching the Animal Planet special just a few days before about the rogue elephants seeking vengeance on poachers (e.g. all humans) for killing their families. 500 elephant-related deaths each year! An elephant-related death is not when someone sees an elephant, trips, and falls off a cliff. No, when even the rhinos and hippos steer clear of elephant-related deaths, you know you should be careful.

And careful I was. Hyper-ventilating-a-little-bit careful, especially when instead of crossing right across the road in front of the car, the elephant walks toward the car for a few steps while flapping its ears. He’s flapping his ears!! Doesn’t that mean he’s angry!!!! (Apparently it can also mean they’re hot.) Or when you come across some elephants who have finished crossing the road, and you slow down to take some pictures before seeing the REST of the elephants on the other side who have not yet crossed the road; yet there you are stuck behind the cars in front of you which have steered into both lanes to take pictures and completely blocked your escape from the snorting elephant right next to your car. And there you are yelling at the car to move, which is not helping to calm the annoyed elephant outside the open window. And then when the driver in front finally gets some sense and pulls forward, you still have to worry about stalling the car, then restarting the car and startling the elephant! Luckily I wasn’t driving in either of these situations, so the car didn’t stall and we didn’t become elephant-related, but you can see why I was a bit nervous on my first day in the park.

I slowly gained my South African legs, though, (finally tanning from their radiant Japanese-sun-kissed paleness) and allowed my nerves to relax a bit. For example, I no longer insisted on rolling up one window when we were both looking out of the other side. Turns out the lions won’t actually appear out of nowhere and jump inside. Aaaaaand I was able to keep my worrying almost completely silent whenever we stopped to enjoy the majestic beauty of the largest land mammal on the planet. Almost…  Aaaaaaaaaand I learned how to properly pronounce wildebeest (vildabiest), giraffe (jirahf), and zebra (zehbra), pronunciations that I will accept as compromise for my continuing to say “tomayto” while in this country. Still, when you suddenly spot movement in the trees on the side of the road, it does take time to get from “wildebeest! I mean vildebeest! I mean wildebiest! I mean….” And by then you’ve already gone by…  :(

There was plenty of time to practice, though, as it’s still the dry season here, meaning the grass is low and brown and the trees are still leafless. This means you can see deep deeeep into the bush and across the plains. However, this isn’t even necessary most of the time, as the animals gravitate toward the man-made waterholes close to the trails or straight to the roadsides where a little grass grows from the water runoff. No matter how close the animals get, though, it’s still very easy to mistake a log for a rhino (I’m still bitter about that one), an elephant for a boulder (masters of camouflage, they are), and an unnaturally tall impala for a giraffe (oops). Don’t even get me started on telling a duiker from a steenbok, though. And I can’t tell a thing from looking at footprints unless it’s an elephant. Did you know footprints are called spoor? I always thought spoor meant droppings, maybe because of the ‘poo’ in it.

Every day in the park gave us new adventures and new scenery, as we drove from the dense trees of the southern bushveld to the more open savannah in the central region of the park. Whether on the paved roads or rough dirt tracks, we rarely ran out of sightings: square-jawed white rhinos relaxing in the shade (stupider and lazier than the pointy-jawed black ones), zebra and their wildebeest chaperones frolicking on the roadsides (don’t separate the SBM wildebeest from his zebra; he will mock charge the car and then run away and be grumpy), long-necked giraffes long-neck-slamming each other in the trees (apparently it’s a male homosexuality thing), and plenty of birds of every shape and size (we ticked off 43 different species, from the small ox-pecker catching a ride on a long-necked giraffe to the hooded vulture pecking at a long-necked carcass). Did you know giraffe meat makes up the majority of a lion’s diet?

Most of our game spottings took place from inside our car, as it’s perfectly convenient to drive around on your own, use your own book to identify animals, and stop as long or short as you want at any point. However, the camp gates close at 6pm and anyone caught driving around after that is toast, either by rangers or lions. So to see the wild nightlife that Kruger has to offer, you must book on a guided night drive. We did this twice – once in the open savannah near Satara Camp, and once through the riverside bush around Olifants Camp. On these drives, you ride in an open-air van and shine flashlights into the darkness until you see red or green eyes staring back at you. The red eyes were the most exciting, as they are usually found on animals that could eat you, like lions. There were plenty of new animals to see, like servals (my favorite from my childhood cat book), genets (kind of like long-tailed raccoons), and scurrying red romans (spiders from another dimension rumored to steal sleeping people’s hair). Otherwise, we got to see the usual daytime animals up to new things – hippos out grazing (they’ll sometimes wander 20-30km a night!), the neck and head of a resting giraffe sticking up out of the grass (they sleep less than 20 minutes a day!), and a very close-up view of an elephant running a thorn branch through her mouth like it was… like it wasn’t a freakin’ thorn branch.

I haven’t even gotten to the leopard, the last of the Big 5 on our list to see. Have I mentioned the Big 5? That would be the lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, and cape buffalo (looks like a water buffalo, but the natives get offended when you call it that). We were lucky to catch sight of four rhino on our third day in the park, but the leopard had eluded us until now. But on a chance of luck on our night drive at Olifants, while the whole group was staring out the left side at a nearby giraffe, Mike happened to shine a light out the right and notice a leopard three meters from the van. Everyone leaped to the right of the van, and our guide backed up to get a better view, almost running over the giraffe, which had just decided to cross the road. The leopard was the highlight of the night, not only jogging alongside the road for a while next to us, but reappearing later on to hunt a group of terrified impala right in front of us. He probably regretted that, though, as it’s hard to be a successful stalker when you have six lights on you and a loud woman calling out to the guide, “ARE WE MESSING UP HIS HUNT???” Sigh.

I could go on for pages more about the different animals in Kruger Park, but I’ll move on – to the camps of Kruger Park!!! We booked the standard one-room circular bungalow (rondavel) with a porch and braai (it’s not barbeque here) for each of the four nights. The first two we stayed in only had views of other bungalows, but our third night at Olifants was in a “perimeter” bungalow with a lovely view of the riverbed below as well as of a fallen branch that looked a lot like a leopard through the binoculars. Then our last night at Mopani Camp blew even that away with our “view” bungalow – perhaps the only one in the camp with a practically uninterrupted sunset view of the lake below. When we arrived, the banks were filled with elephants, buffalo, waterbuck and crocodiles, making us very hesitant to leave the camp – ever – especially after we met the adorable local monitor that lived under the rock next to our porch. Ah paradise. There’s nothing like drifting to sleep to the sound of grunting hippos.

But the time came to move on, and we sadly left Kruger on the fifth day of our journey. It was strange to not be looking for elephants on the side of the road and giraffe heads poking up above the trees, but we had plenty more to see before this trip was over.

Blyde River Canyon, the largest forested canyon in the world, is an unexpected oasis that seemed out of place after the dry expanses to its east. Not that it was very green either at this time of year, but the numerous waterfalls down its course fall into lush miniature jungles that even my native South African guide was surprised to discover in his country. But even in the dryer main canyon, the barren rock itself was enough to make the entire trip worthwhile. Cape Town’s famous Table Mountain may be the only sight known to non-South Africans, but the Drakensburg Mountains that stretch across the east part of the country are full of flat-topped marvels. And when you gaze across the massive canyon, you can see the stratified layers upon layers that ripple across the cliff faces, once part of an ancient seabed and now pushed up to over a mile above sea level. From what I learned in my geology classes, I can judge that it’s really really old.

After a night at the northern part of the canyon and an almost-hike in the morning (it’s just as easy to drive to the scenic views), we took a full day to drive along the Panorama Route the runs down the west side of the canyon, stopping at all the scenic points and every waterfall we could find. We also stopped for two hours in Graskop, home of the famous gorge swing (one of the highest gorge swings in the world!!!) that gives you an 18-story fall into the beautiful forest until you hit the end of the rope and swing across and back and forth until you’re lowered to the canyon floor. Two hours might seem a lot for this, but it did take us over an hour at the Drop Bar on the other side to drink the courage we would need to actually do the swing. And it did take a bit of time to climb back up the 18 stories of rickety steps after the swing (which made up for that skipped morning hike, right?). The rest of the day seemed a bit slow after that, but beautiful nonetheless, and we reached our last hotel south of the canyon with just enough time to rest up for our final day of the trip.

The final day – Oct 1, 2011 – booked weeks in advance for a once-in-a-month opportunity: the Crystal Tour at Sudwala Cave. Not only do you go almost 2km past the standard tour offered at this cave, but you crawl through chest-deep water, slide along clay-covered rock ledges, climb over boulder piles, and slither through small openings that you wouldn’t think they’d allow normal tourists to slither through.  And all you have are headlamps! Like in the movies! Except it’s darker because you don’t have all those lighting dudes around. And not only must you worry about not slipping and breaking a bone in the difficult maneuvers, but you must worry about the camera you stupidly (and wonderfully) brought along to capture this once-in-a-lifetime experience. “Is that a waterproof camera?” No… “Oh, so that’s a waterproof bag?” Umm. No…“Oh…” Still, every picture is worth a thousand bruises.

Even now I can’t tell which was a more thrilling experience – three seconds of whimpering, heart-pounding freefall or three hours of wincing mud-soaked gymnastics. I’ve gotta say it’s a lot nicer to find a chamber of crystals at the end instead of a 15-minute stair climb.

Now, one month gone and one month to go. I’ll be off in three days for a week of scuba diving and game drives on the east coast, so I’ll get back to you after that. Funemployment sure has its benefits. I mean, not real benefits, like health insurance and retirement plans, but you don’t need all those till you’re 40 or something, right? Right? Whatever. I’m going fishin’!!!!

Miss you all. Tell me what you’re up to if you get a chance!

Love, Kat