The Game (Part 1)

The one thing I had looked forward to the most for this trip was to see the exotic wildlife in their natural habitats. The minute you arrive in South Africa, you'll start noticing postcards with pictures of five animals on them with the phrase “The African Big Five” written in bold fancy fonts. The animals are:

1)Lions

2)Leopards

3)Elephants

4)Buffaloes

5)Rhinos

I don't know the actual history behind this grouping of animals—how they got to be seemingly more important than the non-big-five, but these creatures are what people look forward to seeing the most in the safari. It's very common that you won't see all of them in just one trip, but luckily we found them all!

At Lion Sands game reserve, there are 2 game drives per day, and each drive takes about 3-4 hours. Each group of guests is assigned to one ranger and one tracker who will stick with them for their entire stay. The first game starts at 6am, and the second one starts at 4pm. During our stay, we were able to fit in 3 game drives. The way it works is this: the guests are put in the back seats of this AMAZING vehicle which can sail over anything and EVERYTHING.

The ranger drives the vehicle, and the tracker sits in the front seat which is located above the vehicle's headlight. Our ranger is Manus (AKA Marcus), who is extremely knowledgeable about wildlife animals and plants. Million, our tracker, is a local person from an African sub-culture called Chungan. Million has an excellent instinct and experience in finding the animals.

Manus and Million work together to track where the animals might be by looking at paw prints, dungs, and random things that don't really make much sense unless you're a pro at tracking. By looking at a faint paw print on the dirt road, they're able to tell:

1)what kind of animal the paw belongs to

2)the animal's gender

3)an estimate age of the animal

4)roughly when the paw print was made

5)what direction the animal was heading

Basically, we just keep driving. When Million picks up a trail of an animal that we want to see, Manus just follows Million's directions. Most of the time, we would stay on the small path made for the vehicle, but we're allowed to go off road only to follow the trail of the big-five animals.
We saw a LOT of kudus, impalas, and nyalas. They travel in group, and we found quite a few very big groups. Luckily we're in the middle of a baby season—almost every animal we saw had babies.

The first animals we saw that got us really excited were warthogs. They are very cute in real life. The whole family stick together—moms in front, then the babies, and the dad would stay at the end to make sure everyone's alright. They're much tinier than I expected.

The first big-five we saw was, surprisingly, a big male leopard. Leopard is one of the most difficult animal to spot because leopards hunt and live alone and move around a lot. The one we saw had just hunted an impala for dinner, and he was getting quite full and tired. Usually they'd take their hunts up a tree to prevent the food from being stolen by hyenas, but this one was just enjoying his meal under a tree.

The next big-five we saw were a big herd of buffaloes who had just crossed the river from the greater Kruger park. There were so many of them—over a hundred, and they kept walking and eating into the bush. We had to go off-road after them for a while to get some decent pictures because they were moving so fast. There were a few babies running after their moms, too.

Next, we saw a herd of lions... four females and, surprise surprise, eight cubs!!! The cubs were really cute. They were running around and then started feed on their moms. Manus told us that it was his first time seeing them, too. About a hundred or so meters away, we found two male lions enjoying themselves under the shade.

As we were looking at the lions, Manus heard sounds of the elephants, and there they were—all forty of them! He (Manus) became very cautious about his next move. Instead of going directly from the lions to the elephants, he took a detour, so that the elephants wouldn't detect that we had just come from the lions. This is to protect the cubs because if the elephants knew that there were lion cubs, the elephants would try to kill the cubs by stepping on them.

The herd of elephants we saw had at least 3 HUGE males, one of whom was trying to mate right in front of us (which got us really nervous because male elephants can be very aggressive during the mating season). There were also a lot of babies. The little ones were curious and tried to get close to check us out. Again, we had to be careful because if the moms think that the babies were in harm, they would make a sound and then the big daddies would come. We don't want that.

An interesting thing happened as we were leaving the herd. Since there were soooooo many of them, and a lot of them were blocking the road, we had to drive off-road. The more we drove further into the bush, the more elephants we found. We were basically surrounded by these big animals, and we couldn't get out. The sun was also coming down, so it was getting really dark. We spent a lot of time trying to find and get back to the road. Manus and Million seemed to be disagreeing on something the whole time (we wouldn't know because they speak Chungan when they talk among themselves). Manus told us later that night that Million gets nervous around elephants because he had witnessed two people killed by some angry elephants a long time ago.

I can't write anymore tonight. More animals to come later...