Kruger National Park

Thursday was a "homebody" day. I spent most of the day getting the Trunk Show photos ready for release. I have a few more hours to do on it and it will be ready to go. The final touches and editing are about done. Then I need photos of the newest projects that Santi is taking to the states! Since I leave here on Thursday, there is a lot to be done before then. This Saturday is Declan's Christining and then a few days after that, Santi and Peter leave for their working holiday in Holland! Peter was born in Holland and this will be his first trip back since he was very young. They will also be getting some site seeing while they are there.



Friday morning we were getting ready to go back to Kurger Park to spend the weekend there! Last weekend we did do a quick 3 hours there while we were in the area, but this weekend was 2 days on a photo safari. It's going to take me a few days to get through all 600+ photos for the weekend but I'm excited to start on it!



The quick list of animals and birds would be: Maibu Stork, a large herd of giraffes, baboons, hippos, Crested Barbet, Cape Glossy Starling, lions, White Fronted Bee Eaters, elephants, elephants and more elephants, crocadiles, duika, wart hogs, rhinos, cheeta, kudu, impala and a rock monitor, but that's not the entire list! And as I get into the blog later, I'll tell you what one of the more intersting things we saw were!



Friday morning it was beginning to rain. Summer rains here are like summer rains in the South at home. They can range from a drizzle to thunderstorms in a short time! We were supposed to leave at 1:30pm but the rain started to pour about noon. Liese and Cara decided that leaving a bit earlier might be a wise idea. So, we packed up the Kombi and started to pick up the rest of the "tourists" for the weekend trip. 5 of us went for the weekend, Liese, Cara and Stefan, Poppi (a family friend) and me. It was a good thing that we did leave a little early after all, we had to drive to Mari's to pick up the Kombi (it's parked there when not in use because Mari has room for it) and drop off Cara's car on the other side of town, pick up Poppi and Stefan who live near Cara and then hit the road. We left town about 2pm which is when the girls wanted to be on the road! It is about a 3 1/2 drive from Middleburg to the park entrance and we needed to be at the gate by 6pm. We thought we had enough time, but then there was road construction, horrible traffic and a little longer gas stop than anticipated.



We arrived at the gate at 6:01pm and they will not allow you to drive unescorted in the park after 6pm! They are pretty serious about that as you see. We had to wait for an escort to take us to the campsite at Skukuza. Then there is the part about having to wait for the rest of the tardy "tourists" until about 7pm. It was still drizzling while we waited and there was concern about rain over the weekend! So just as the escort arrived, the staff started to hand out keys for the challets and of course there was confusion about our groups keys! By the time everything was sorted out, we got to our rooms about 8pm and still had dinner to deal with. Santi had made some food to bring along with us, so we broke out the food and had dinner.



When everyone had gone to bed, I sat outside the room and listened to the night in the park. The insect life at night sings with the different sounds that the critters make. I did a little personal writing as I sat out there battling the moth from hell! This moth was close to the size of a humming bird and it decided to make bombing runs at me while I was writing! Moths are harmless I know, but when you're sitting out in the middle of the Savannah (jungles are farther north from South Africa) anything can and does startle you! The clouds from the rain obstructed the view of the sky which made the sky seem eearliy dark. I finally crawled into my bed and the next thing I knew my finely handcrafed alarms, Cara and Liese were telling me it was morning!



Friday was long day and Saturday promised to be even longer. Our day started at 5am. For safety, the gates in and out of the campsites are closed and locked through the night. The gates are opened at 6am and we wanted to be out and about as early as we could be. The best viewing time for the animals are early when it's cool and later in the afternoon after the weather started to cool as well. During the hotter part of the day, the most animals find shade to wait out the heat.



And we were off! We drove for a while without seeing much other than birds. The Kombi's occupants were getting a little itchy to find some wildlife out there and I think we were up before the animals myself! Finally they came out of hiding here and there. Stefan is getting into bird watching so when we couldn't find animals we were looking for birds along the way. South Africa has an amazing assortment of bird life in the park. Santi had gotten me a tourist book of the park and it gave information on most popular animals, birds, reptiles and trees in the park. That was helpful in identifying birds but there were many that weren't in that book so Cara and Stefan would look through Stefan's bird book that he brought along for the ride. I thought it was funny, kind of like looking words up in the dictionary, you have to come pretty close to the proper spelling to know where to look! But Cara and Stefan did a good job of identifying some of the birds that we got a good look at.



Some of the roads through the park were paved and others were dirt roads leading off into loops around the main roads. We took a lot of those dirt roads and got off of the paved road and it paid off in the long run. Early in the morning we really didn't catch a lot of animals, but once they started to come out of hiding we found a lot!



Many of the animals were a distance from the road so we were using binoculars for a closer view. I have no idea how these "kids" spotted so many that I couldn't see even with instructions LOL. "See that tree over there and the stand of trees behind it? OK look a little up and to the right and you'll see it." Oh yeah right! You would think it would be pretty easy to find a giraffe wouldn't you? I'll be uploading photos of the animals using the zoom lens and then photos of actual size. In these photos you'll see why I was amazed at the spotting talent of the "kids" in the Kombi!

We started off with Cara and Liese on both sides of the Kombi. Poppi and I had similar experience as spotters and of course There was Stefan... He was pretty good but between you and me, the girls were better :) It didn't take long before I was checking animals off left and right! We did very good in finding 4 out of the 5 "Big 5" this weekend!

For the record, the "Big 5" are the leopard (MIA this weekend), the elephant, the lion, the buffalo (with big curled horns) and the rhino. Liese told me why they were the "Big 5". I kind of thought cause they were the biggest kids on the block but Liese told me that it is because they are the 5 most dangerous when they are injured!

Before I close this, I want to add what, in my opinion, was the best parts of the weekend, other than the company of course... Remember the weekend before this, where we did the "Elephant Day" and the "Birds of the Dead" days? It was that weekend that made this trip to Kruger most interesting. Yes, we saw a bunch of animals, up close and personal, in their natural habitats and those are memories I'll never forget to be sure. But it was the lessons learned that weekend at the Elephant Sanctuary and the Moholoholo Rehabilitation Center were really put into persepctive this weekend.

First, there was a dead impala in the bush. We're not sure what it died from but we spotted first the circling vultures and found our way to where they were circling. There were many vultures of all types circling or waiting for the "big guy" to come and open the carcus. They circled, if you recall, to "call" the big guy (I think it was a variety of "Griffons") because he has the sharp beek to open the carcus. Once they too their turn it was time for the White Headed Vultured to come in and eat their fill. And then the smaller kids finish off the meat on the bones...

When we got there, as I said, there we many vultures waiting. There were other people who were looknig at them and wondering why they weren't just feeding! Of course Cara, Stefan and I knew very well and we shared what we had learned with Liese and Poppi. We waited for a while, but remember, there are few of the big guys (now don't I wish I had paid more attention to the lecture at the time???) and it can take them a while to show up at the party. We stayed there as long as we could but we had the time issue to worry about as well. We went to a picnic area about 2 k's up the road. We had a quick lunch and Liese suggested that we go back for a last look to see what was happening with the vultures.

We were suprised in that scant hour we were gone, the big boys had come and gone and the White Headed vultures were having their turn. Luckily we didn't have exactly front row seats, but we saw the vultures squabbling over the impala and they were making it a quick lunch as well! We watched for a while and although it seems cruel, it was interesting to watch them in action. I think we all found it more facinating because of our trip to the Rehab center the week before!

We had to move on before the little guys would get their turn, but keep in mind that we had been gone for less than an hour and the carcus was getting clean! We were told at the Rehab Center that it would take vultures less than 3 hours to clean a large animal and the impala was far from a large animal! Of the famiy here, no one had ever seen the vultures at work. They have a very important job in the life cycle of the Savannah.

We were tired and on our way out of the park when we came across a gathering of cars. We couldn't immediately see what the attraction was, but we did see that it was elephants within a few seconds. There was a tourist bus sitting in front of the elephants on the right side of the road. You could see all of the toursits in the bus had crowded onto the right side of the bus (too funny). There was a small red import car behind the bus. On the left side of the road, there was line waiting to see the elephants as well. All of the sudden we could hear trumpeting coming from the bush on the right side and then we saw a head pop out and she was shaking her head and trumpeting and she wasn't happy! Of course the tourist bus sat there, letting the tourists in his car happily snapping photos of the very unhappy elephants! She warned everyone with the trumpeting, shaking her head and flapping her ears! Any idiot could see a problem was coming. Cara had already suggested rather loudly that the Kombi should be in reverse just in case. She could barely get it out of her mouth before Mama as storming out of the bush! She began to charge the bus. Cara was hanging out the window trying to get the car behind us to back up! We're not sure, but we think that he couldn't see beyond the Kombi that Mama was charging! Cara finally convinced him to back up and the bus (who was making Mama unhappy in the first place) began to creep SLOWLY ahead. Remember, there was a red import between the elephant and the bus! We were a little concerned for him as the elephant was still moving closer. Now, the bus driver, who was definately an idiot passed us and we could see that he was looking back in his side mirror laughing! His tourists were being amused but I'm not sure if they even knew what kind of danger they may have been in!

The elephant calmed down as the bus moved away and out of the bush came 2 babies and another Mama. The 2nd female was herding the kids across the road, honestly, there may have been another adult but we were busy watching the first female. She was standing in the middle of the road daring anyone to come close to the babies! As the others crossed the road, we watched as she back up to the left side of the road and then looked both ways to check traffic and went into the bush herself...

I found that very cool (but remember, I had to be told to come out of tornado weather in TN a few years ago :) I wasn't the driver so there wasn't much I could have done and there was a car or 2 in front of us. When the red import finally came up close to us, Stefan asked, "So, how was it?" The driver was laughing and said, "exhaurerating!!!" I can believe that! I knew how we felt in our fairly safe place! Again, it was the visit to the Elephant Sanctuary and the information that we had been given there, gave me a very good idea, without explaination, as to what was going on.

What we saw after we passed where the elephants had crossed, was that they were heading down to a river. By the time we could see well, we saw that there were other elephants already down by the rivers edge and more were moving in that direction. We tried to get over to see them but we got a very limited view of them.

So, although we had already seen most of the animals on Saturday, we got a better view of several of them on Sunday on our wandering way out of the park and on the way home! Where Saturday I would call "eye candy", the education did come on Sunday!

We arrived home about 6:30pm on Sunday, tired yet still excited about what we had seen over the weekend! Now, I have to go through about 600 or so photos and decide which are going into the Picasa albums! I'm not sure that I'll get them all posted for a while though. I may have to wait until I get home to get them all up :) And let's not forget my trip to the Lesedi Cultural today with Elsa from Elsasdesigns.com....