We are off to Cameroon tomorrow so I will take this one moment to post about Kruger Park and then will have to come back with a full-on-long-post regarding all of the other wonderful places we have visited in this lovely country!
We went to Kruger Park, South Africa's premiere national game park, during the World Cup semi-finals (we watched the Uruguay-Netherlands and Germany-Spain matches in the Park, to give you an idea of the timeframe). Unlike the Serengeti, which is largely full of foreigners, Kruger is full of South African families on school-holiday. These folks drive from all over the country, tour the park in their own vehicles, and rent small bungalows and braai every night (South Africans love braais = BBQs).
Much of the park has paved roads - and even the dirt roads are graded so our little car (smaller than our Yaris at home) can easily travel on them - and visitors can see all of the favorite animals (lions, elephants, giraffs, rhinos, hyenas, buffalo, leopards, cheetahs, etc). The setting is very different than the Serengeti (my only frame of reference for this stuff) - while Tanzania's park is very flat with little in the way of shrubs or trees, Kruger has many stretches with thick bushes meaning that an elephant is either 10 yards from your car, or he is 20 yards away, but you can't see him through the growth. This is both exciting and frustrating, either your sightings are great ones very near, or you can drive along for an hour seeing very little. Also, because there are so many people in the park driving themselves, as soon as there is something cool, a crowd of cars collects, jockeying for good-picture-positions.. The Serengeti was pretty empty of people and everyone had guides driving them. While we had some great highlights with elephants, hyenas, rhinos and lions, we did not see any leopards or cheetahs like we did in Tanzania.
The accommodations in Kruger are great big campuses with camping, permanent tents, and small bungalows with kitchens and bathrooms. We did not plan ahead, so the only thing we could get were the bungalows (and the reservations woman told us we were lucky to get that, that there were some cancellations otherwise the place would have been COMPLETELY full).
Our first day we searched and searched for lions but only managed to see a couple far away just before we had to get back to the bungalow (you can only drive yourself around from sun-up to sun-down, then only guides can drive guests, for animal and people safety I suppose).
We needed help finding lions! The lodging campuses have maps up where guests note where they sighted animals, which is pretty cool. We checked the map for lion sightings (since they hang out in their turfs, a couple of kilometers from one another, these sightings maps can be good guides for where to find them from one day to the next). The map had many, many lion sightings. Sigh. We also heard this dude bragging to some people about seeing 20 lions in 4 days.. Sigh, the lions are all over, just not where we were looking!
We committed to find them the next day by getting up a dawn, when they are more active.. (Getting up at dawn is much harder for me than for Scott for some reason.) On the road that next morning we saw hyenas and all manner of birds and antelope but NO lions.. Darn it.. By the evening we came across a crowd of cars and joined the group viewing a sleeping lioness right near the road and a male lion. The word from the crowd of cars was that they were a mating pair. We hear that lions mate for a week or so and during that period they will have sex up to 700 times. Exciting. We waited by the side of the road, hoping the lioness would wake up in the mood. No such luck, we had to return to camp as sun-down was approaching. Good lion sighting but not great.
The next morning, up at dawn again. Hyenas in the road again, we are a magnet for those animals it seemed. No lions for one and a half hours. Then, on a dirt road (good because little traffic), we saw a car stopped ahead of us in a river bed which was largely dried out, but still had small pools of water in it. We looked about spied one, two, three, four.. SEVEN lions!! Two lionesses and 5 cubs, the cubs were probably several months old.. OH Sweet Kruger overlords! It was awesome, the babies were playing in the river sand, we sat there for more than an hour.. They played and drank water, then the lionesses looked disturbed/interested in something along the river bed.. We looked in the direction of their gaze/noses and saw a GIANT male lion walking right towards us! This created great drama because the males sometimes kill baby lions so that they can mate with the mothers (like people, mommy lions do not often conceive while they are attending to babies/nursing). Would the male lion pick a fight to get to the lady lions??
Our lions playing in the sand.
Male lion passing by our car, keeping an eye on the group of lions in the sand.
Lionesses have their babies peering over this sand bar as the male passes by.
He would put himself at great peril to try this, two female adults could cause him a lot of damage. He veered off away from them, both groups eying one another warily. In avoiding the lionesses, he walked right past our car. It was awesome..The best lion sighting ever. Strange but not that strange that the 'best' sightings one can have of animals involve either mating or violence.
Luckily, we had this great experience our last day in Kruger, I left loving the place of course!
We also had a great encounter with a mommy and baby white rhino when we staked out a water hole. The baby rhino was very cute, babies always do a lot more than the adults, those adults are always saving energy and not moving much.
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