Looking for the Big Five

We got up with the sun to go Kodak hunting. It reminded me of a story about how it doesn't matter if you are a lion or an antelope; when the sun comes up you better be running. Well we were. Armed with a wide range of cameras and driving everything from Lyle's white BMW to Dean's rugged 4x4 we set off to see the big game. The morning started with a little intrigue- we came up on a pile of cars and learned that they had just seen two leopards run across the road and then heard them calling out. Dean says that leopards only make noise when they mate so we figured they must have gotten a room, so to speak. We moved on to give them the appropriate privacy.

It seemed like ages before we saw anything else but just as I was thinking about taking a nap we came around a bend and found a pack of wild dogs loitering in the road. There were at least fifteen of them and none showed the slightest inclination to move as four cars inched towards them. Apparently wild dogs are really rare- there are only 300 or so in the 6 million acres of Kruger. So we sat there for about twenty minutes observing. They must have had a kill recently because one of them had the head of a young impala in its mouth. The imagine of one head sticking out of another head is probably my favorite picture from Kruger. Talk about the Circle of Life.  Meanwhile, the other dogs alternated between napping and hipping at his heels and tail to try to take the skull. The contrast between extreme agression and perfectly docile behavior was pretty extreme but their antics were quite entertaining.

As the morning progressed we saw zebras trotting down the road, elephants mowing down bushes, water buffalo wallowing the in the mud, rhinos hiding in the trees and a hippo ambling along the riverbed. It certainly wasn't the type of safari I had imagined- cruising around in a Chevy Spark (hybrid) with the flip-flop sporting Galen at the wheel rather than a seasoned black guide with a rifle in a rack behind his head in a Land Rover 4X4, but the animal sightings exceeded expectations.

We came back to the house for brunch and made scrambled eggs, bacon (proper bacon rather than fried English ham) and breakfast potatoes. We ate on the back porch as we watched crocodiles sun themselves on the sandbar in the distance and dodged leaves and twigs dislodged by monkeys scampering around in the trees above our heads. It was pretty unreal. The rest of the afternoon was spent lounging on the porch. As the heat from the sun began to wane I crossed the street to go into the Skukuza camp for a couple laps running around the perimeter. As soon as I slipped in the gate I was intercepted by a huge warthog. He looked a lot like Puma but didn’t seem nearly as affable so I backed away slowly and went about my business. Fortunately that was the only animal sighting on my run. The evening game was pretty quiet. We saw a herd of elephants bathing in the river and some mongooses popping in and out of the grass like a game of whack-a-mole. Dinner was conducted outside again under a blanket of the brightest stars I have ever seen. We made a thick stew in a very magical looking cauldron and Alice, our resident Australian, gave us a little tutorial on the constellations in the Southern Hemisphere.