On safari

On Safari
Thursday morning we went to the Seed Of Hope and learned about their farming program called Farming God's Way.  It's three premises are no ploughing, do things to schedule and do things with integrity.  Very interesting!  

In the afternoon we left for the iMfolozi Game Preserve.  It's a 4 hour drive that was beautiful!  When we got to the park it was about a two hour drive to our accommodations.  The entire time we had our eyes peeled for anything moving.  We saw Nahli's, water buffalo, zebras and birds that were just incredible.  The country is absolutely beautiful.  It's lush and green.  We were in rolling hills with those fantastic African trees I love in art.  It was not desert-like at all, except that every once in a while there were sand bars along the rivers.  it was the last couple of hours of daylight and the lighting was stunning.  The sounds, smells and sights were too much, what a privilege to be there.

Once we made it to our little huts, our guide Scott, one of the guys working at the Seed of Hope, brought out all the fixings for a braai, an African BBQ.  It was fabulous!  And Lauren did manage to amputate a hand from a gecko while trying to get it out of our kitchen.

We turned in with the plans of meeting back at the cars for 5:30 in the morning.  There were 10 of us in all so the girls were in one cabin and the boys were next door.  The huts we were in were fabulous but not 'critter'-free.  There were lots of ants and spiders and moths scurrying about but the beds were excellent!  The Schwartz's were downstairs in the bedrooms and I was upstairs on the pull-out.  I fell asleep really quickly but I was a little worried about an insect or spider crawling on me in the night.  I was awoken at one point by what I thought was my cat jumping on my feet, but then I remembered where I was and woke up.  Here in South Africa they don't turn off the tv's because of the humidity so there was a little light and I could see this little cat sized animal huddled in the corner.  All I could see was a big fuzzy tail and scared little eyes.  I started to get up and it ran to the window and it looked like it was trying to get out, but when I did get up it had disappeared.  I did a look around the place and didn't find it anywhere so we are assuming it found a hole to get out of.  But it did eat some tea that we left on the counter in a ziplock baggie  and it left some poop on the counter for us!  Our guide did see it the next night and he didn't know what it was so, I'm not sure what that means.

We were up early and off.  We were in two vehicles so we switched in and out during the day.  We stayed out until around 11 and it was 36 degrees by then.  So we hung out in the pool to cool off and ate some lunch.  Then we went back out around 2:30 and stayed out until sunset, 7:00.  The first morning we didn't see much. We did see some giraffes and dung beetles.  The beetles were definitely the funniest animals.  Did you know they fly?  We had the honor of having Jody in our car and her fears and incredible humor are always entertaining.  As we drove by a particularly fresh pile of dung, crawling with beetles, one flew up and Jody tried to get the window up before the beetle got in and in the aftermath she said " I would rather ride a rhino than have a dung beetle in my lap". Little did we know Jody would end our time at the reserve actually riding a rhino.  You'll have to ask her about that yourselves!

The afternoon was excellent, we saw so many rhinos!  They are so huge!  You really can't get a grip on how big they are until you are close to them!  We also turned a corner at one point and almost ran into 3 giraffes on the road.  They are magnificent.  We also managed to hem in a rhino family of 3 and they didn't seem very happy about it.  Several people were trying to get out of the way but there were four vehicles right beside the rhinos.  It all ended well, but it was exciting!

We also saw wildebeests, water buffalo, vultures, hawks,impalas, turtles, millipedes and so many more! Buy we did not see elephants and lions, so we set out at 5 Saturday morning optimistic and bleary eyed.  And we were not disappointed!

Our first major sighting started with a lone hyena wandering towards a bunch of trees, but just around the bend there was a car parked (that's usually a good sign) so we went towards that car.  We parked there and this is what we saw.

From the road the grass sloped down a little for about 100 yards with short stubby bushes dotting the landscape.  Down at the bottom of the bowl was a little grove of trees and behind that there was a large rolling hill.  On that hill was a herd of water buffalo that were quietly grazing, but they seemed slightly wary and then we saw another couple of hyenas over near them.   Closer to us we noticed a few wild dogs hanging around, but a little back from the hyenas.  Apparently this pack of wild dogs is very rare to see, and they wear collars because they are an endangered species. Our guide had never seen them before!  

Then we see them, in the little grove of trees is a lion pair, a male and a female, and they are keeping an eye on the several hyenas that seem to have them circled.  The hyenas slowly tightened the circle until one of the lions would get up and slowly pace out.  If the hyena backed off the lion would go back and lay down, but if not, the lion would charge the hyena, chasing it back.  It turns out of course the lions had made a recent kill and the male got up and walked over to it, bit off the leg of the water buffalo carcass and went back to the trees to eat.  While he ate, the female guarded the carcass, then they switched.  As we watched this going on, a whole flock of vultures moved in and sat on a tree waiting for the lions to finish.  So we are seeing water buffalo, lions, hyenas, wild dogs and vultures all within 3 or4 hundreds yards of each other!

Once the lions decided they were finished they just let the hyenas get closer and closer without chasing them off anymore and one hyena got a leg and took it away. Then the vultures swarmed the carcass and they feasted for a long time.  Grim and amazing all at the same time.  Mixed in with the regular vultures was a rare white headed vulture as well.

There were several cars hanging around by this time and all the guides agreed this was an amazing sight!

Later on we had our first elephant sighting, way off in the distance.  We saw one more a little closer in but that was it for the morning.  We stopped for a quick bite of lunch and kept going.  It was much cooler today with some cloud cover, so it only went up to 28 degrees (sorry Calgary with all your snow).  We were really hoping to see more elephants and a leopard that afternoon.  We decided to get specific and we asked for some elephants really close up.  God did not disappoint!  

We saw a lot of elephants!  We stopped near one watering hole where we saw 2 elephants and their baby playing in the water.  Then they started coming straight towards us.  Apparently they wanted to cross the road right where we were.  We backed up to let them by but they still seemed agitated so we scooted past them.  Then a whole herd of them walked by!  It was spectacular!  We also saw another lone elephant, and he was breaking trees for fun.  I guess elephants are called nature's vandals for good reason!

We saw many, many more animals throughout the day.  Then we came up to a place where a car was parked and all we saw were wart hogs (we had seen 10's of them already by then) so we almost moved on when we realized there were 3 cheetahs resting under a tree not even 100 yards away.  They were bathing and stretching and rolling.  I LOVE CATS!!!!!  They were definitely my favorite!  One of them stood up and I couldn't believe how long it was!  He was sitting and he was taller than 6 feet for sure!

What a decadent day!  We left the park around 1:30 and headed home.  We did not have Internet out there so I am just updating this now, but I won't be able to upload it until tomorrow.  It's 10 and we were up at 4:45 this morning so I am off to bed.

Thanks for your replies all!  I miss my family terribly right now.  I had a quick scratchy phone call with them tonight and then cried.  I didn't realize how much I was going to miss them!

Well I'm off to bed.  The chirp of the crickets cicadas and frogs has been replaced by the noise of the pounding surf again!

Good night from KZN in SA!