I'm sitting here typing at sunset on a wildlife reservation, listening to some birds call and watching some waterbuck chew grass. So that's how my day is going, how's yours?
We woke up at 4 in the morning to be ready for our 5am bus, provided by Intrepid Travel (highly recommended), a company that does adventure outings on the cheap for young travelers that don't mind tents, vans, and picking up their own bags now and then. It ended up being a 6-7 hour drive to Kruger National Park, one of the largest wildlife reserves in the world.
For the record: you know that Lion King moment? The one where the red sun pierces the horizon, and everything simmers and sizzles a little? Yeah. It's real. And it lives up to the hype. The veld, South Africa's grassy plain, with its green grass blowing, and trees silhouetted by the sunrise, and fog floating 8 feet above the ground? It lives up to the hype. And your first hour in Kruger? Dude. Exceeds the hype like nothing you can imagine.
As John Malale, our rocking tour guide, took us through the gates in a big open jeep with extra seats in it, we immediately saw some steenbock and impala. Within half an hour, we had almost brushed by an elephant munching on a boatload of food. And as we ate our lunch a few miles into the park, we watched hippos waddling across a river while monkeys warily inched closer to our food (they, by the way, are still creepy. I've seen Outbreak too many times to allow them anywhere near me).
You can see photos here and here and here and here (and here and here), but the highlights as far as animals are concerned:
Seeing a pride of lions moving into the bush on a night time game drive. We didn't see the kill, but we saw the results of another one the next morning.
A family of elephants crossing the road in front of you.
A herd of buffalo crossing the road in front of you. Pretty much anything rocking it within spitting distance of your car is pretty ridiculous.
A lake populated entirely by hippos. They're not the rarest sight at Kruger, but they're still my favorite. Those gigantic ears, the way they make these terrifyingly loud honks/snorts/roars while their mouths are fully submerged, and the fact that they look like big floating bean bags all add up to them being a perfect mix of humorous and dangerous.
A crash of rhinos – yes, a crash – getting scared off by a troop of baboons. Apparently the rhinos have really bad eyesight, so all those crazy noises when the apes are play-fighting do a bit of a number on them.
Taking a walk – just little sister and me, without all the rigamarole of asking our hosts if this was a good idea – into the bush at our lodge on the 3rd evening. We slept in tented camps the first two nights, now we're on a private game reserve where the bungalows are in the same fenced in area as the animals – no predators here, so don't worry. As we were talkinga bout how crazy quiet it was, we came face to face with a giraffe and a kudu, who had heard us coming from a mile away. The giraffe, about twenty yards from us and standing a story and a half tall, stood staring us down for a minute or two before realizing that we were not to be trifled with, and stalked away.
The animals have been the main attraction, but the group dynamic has been a blast as well. There are only 5 people on the trip including us, which is way less than usual, especially considering the World Cup is 4 days away. We're the lone Americans, accompanied by an Aussie, a German, and an Englishman. We're all here for the tournament, and as luck would have it, Australia and Germany play each other the day after England and the U.S., so there's been a lot of trash talking. Alexis bought a small soccer ball to juggle though, and our daily kickarounds have proved a sort of footy diplomacy.
Our guide, John, is a deep voiced man who is all smiles until he's driving the car. As soon as he's beyond the camp gates, he's a hawk. In our first few minutes, as we were spotting assorted fauna on the side of the road, he said, “you see the giraffe?”
We didn't.
“Look at the tall tree. To the left of it, about two hundred meters out.”
We saw a fuzzy white vertical line, which then fluttered its ears. With his binoculars (he doesn't need them for anything below 200 meters), we saw that it was, indeed, a giraffe peeking up above the treetops. It had not even occurred to us to look all the way out there. John was on a whole different level, which he proved throughout the weekend. He would spot lions in the grass under a tree, obscured by a bush; he would see a bird alighting on the top of a far-off tree that he knew to be on the endangered species list; he would tell me that it wasn't a rhino I was screaming about, it was a large rock – all while driving at 30 miles per hour.
He's also taught me some important things:
“Ayoba” will get you far in this country. It means “it's all good,” and is understood by every tribe around. Hopefully it's not as douchey as actually saying “it's all good” everywhere you go as it would be in America.
Everything sounds cooler if you take a long pause before the object in your sentence, and speak it with a deep voice. “Hey John, where are we going?” “We are going...to Satara.” He could take on James Earl Jones any day.
Brad Mielke will never be able to make the clicking sounds of the Xhosa language. For example, the “xh” in Xhosa is made by clicking your tongue like the sound of a clock. According to him, Alexis is pretty baller at these sounds. I...am not. For the record, I am also not good at impersonating his animal noises, either.
Africans...have a weird sense of humor. He thinks it's really funny when he refers to “jumping down and up.” He likes to ask questions like, “do you see the scorpion?” and pointing to the constellation while you scream and look around your chair. He cracks himself up with jokes about flying – “I was good at running, but someday I will be even better at flying” – he almost started to cry when he told a story about his friend trying to fly out of a tree with nothing but cardboard strapped to his arms. And above all, he likes to talk about the only animal he hasn't seen. “I haven't seen...” he says, “I haven't seen a leopard...riding an elephant. That is what I would like to see.”
Long post, I know, so I'll part with one more cool thing about Kruger. Since it's the size of Wales, and there's not a light anywhere within the horizon at night, you didn't really need animals to keep yourself entertained. All you had to was look up, and enjoy the fullest expanse of stars you'd ever seen. And the great part was – and I wouldn't have remembered this without my roomie Alex reminding me – they're all different stars than we get back home! Thanks, Southern Hemisphere!
