On day three we got up at 4:30AM for a game walk at dawn. So much for a vacation. We piled into an open-air safari truck with our guides Opa and Letis and set off into the inky darkness. Within a few minutes we saw a half dozen sets of eyes glowing in the beams from the headlights. A pack of hyenas was literally trotting right toward us. A few miles later the pack of wild dogs made another appearance. So shortly after when we came upon another set of fury four legged creatures trotting down the road everyone was a bit indifferent. But as we got nearer we realized they were far too large to be dogs. And there were tufts of hair sticking out above their hunched shoulder blades. Lions!!! It was a pride of five juvenile males who looked like they were just reaching maturity. (A male lion’s testosterone level is directly correlated with the size and color of his mane.)
The lions were totting along ten yards in front of the truck and weaving their way casually back and forth across the road. We pulled alongside them and saw that one had long parallel scars running along his shoulder. Another one stared back at us from no more than three feet away. His paws padded softly on the sand and his hips oscillated up and down as he sashayed alongside us.
If I had been stupid enough to try it, I could have reached out and touched him. But I also realized that it would have been no trouble at all for him to lead into the four-foot aperture in the open-air cab of the truck. Everyone was taking pictures frantically. But none of us could seem the “lions at dawn” setting on our cameras so everything kept coming out blurry of black.
After a couple hundred yards of tailing them our guides announced that we would start the game drive here. We all laughed at the joke and continued snapping pictures. But he was serious and pulled the car over. Right. Well I suppose it is better to know where the lions are before you start whacking around in the bush. But the lions scattered as soon as we stepped out of the truck. Our guides then proceeded to walk us through the safety instructions for the game drive. Stay in a single file line. Don’t run if charged by an animal. No talking. Sounded a bit like heading off to recess during kindergarten. But then the teacher wasn’t carrying a rifle.
But after such an exhilarating start, the rest of the morning was rather uneventful by comparison. We followed a black rhino’s tracks through the sand and stopped to observe from a safe distance. We studied the skull and antlers of an Impalla, saw a snake skin hanging from a bush, ducked under spider webs with enormous orb spiders and tried not to crunch the poisonous millipedes we frequently saw underfoot. Our guide’s longest lecture was reserved for a giant undulating pile of poop where we received a fifteen-minute lecture on dung beetles. Apparently there are four types of dung beetles, but the only kind I thought worthy of remembering were the kleptocopry beetles, named because they steal the dung balls rolled by other beetles, pull out the eggs and insert their own. Stealing poop seemed a bit ridiculous but it reminded me of some friends in college who had a tendency to get sticky fingers when they were drunk and open their purses the next morning to discover ping pong balls, straws, shot glasses, playing cards and any number of other pocketable items discovered at parties. Anyway, enough about the kleptos. The walk was a great way to get a more intimate perspective and note the stillness of the bush, the denseness of the vegetation and the small life forms teeming in a seemingly static landscape.
The entertainment picked up again in the afternoon as we sat on the porch whiling away the time. Two hippos dueled for primacy right in front of us, bobbing up from under the water every few minutes like a submarine breaching the surface. They then proceeded to bellow in righteous fury and gnash their sparse teeth. Eventually one ambled off in defeat. When things quieted down a few buffalo came down to wallow in the shallows, the crocodiles resumed their sunbathing and a few elephants came to dehydrate. The menagerie in our backyard almost defeated the point of a game drive but we went out again in hopes of spying a leopard. But an hour’s drive didn’t yield anything carnivorous, just a smattering of horned creatures. On our way back we discovered a troop of baboons scampering along the road, their pink bums bobbing frantically up and down as they scurried for the cover of the trees.
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