Khayamnandi: XIX. Hakuna Matata. It means no worries for the rest of your days.

Monday April 22: Kruger Day 2

Monday morning I had wake up at 4:45am because I was going on an early morning bushwalk that departed from the camp at 5:15am. We drove in open-air vehicles to the spot where we were going to start our walk. Kruger gets really chilly at night, and driving fast in an open-air vehicle, I actually thought my face was frozen in a squinting position. It was painful, but I was so excited that I didn’t care that much.

There were two rangers and eight students. Each ranger had a rifle, which they explained would be used if a large or dangerous animal attacked us. It made it all seem very real. Maybe even a tad to real. It was just the wild animals and us. And nothing but those rifles between. Craziness!

However, on our walk, I learned that game viewing is a lot about patience and not having amazing successes. Sunday was a remarkably lucky experience. On our walk, we didn’t see any of the big five. But we did see waterbuck and impala and wildebeest and spiders and tracks…lots of tracks. We even saw some hippo and lion and lion cub tracks.

It's a waterbuck!

This wildebeest was acting as though he had gone crazy, running this way and that.

We had to walk in single file and silence so as to be safe and not scare animals or attract their attention. Our guides were remarkably knowledgeable and both walked up at the front because they claimed it was the better strategy, however, whenever I was walking in the rear, I was not entirely convinced in the wisdom of this strategy. We had a snack of crackers and cheese and biltong at a watering hole where we saw lion and hippo tracks. But no lions or hippos for us, which although boring, was probably much safer for us! We had to ford a stream at the end of the walk, and had been walking in mud the whole time since it had rained a few days before. The bottom ten inches of my sweatpants and my sneakers were a solid mass of mud (and animal poop). It was disgusting. I’ve never been so muddy in my life. But there’s something about Kruger that makes all worries disappear. I really think Timon and Pumba were onto something when they said “Hakuna Matata!”

Our twenty minute drive back to the camp was filled with more wildlife sightings than was our three hour walk. Win some, lose some. We saw a giraffe walking down the road and our driver sped up the car to almost chase this giraffe. I felt so bad for the poor giraffe. Then he started running and I have to say, as much as I love them and think they are cute, giraffes have THE most awkward run.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKIN' AT?

We also saw zebras and ostriches. And we saw an elephant in the road.

Notice that every other stripe on the zebra is brown?

And then cutest moment in all of Kruger, I saw a family of giraffes and a family of zebras hanging out together. There were two baby giraffes. And a baby zebra that was less than a week old based on the fact that you could still see it’s little umbilical cord stump. IT WAS SO CUTE. My heart was just overflowing with happiness. Life doesn’t get better than that!

Baby!!!

Look at these two dorky kids!

Umbilical cord stump still attached. So tiny!

When we got back to camp, we had breakfast and then I lay out on the lawn between the huts where my group was staying with a couple people. I put on some country music on my laptop and soaked up the sunshine and heat, wrote in my journal and wrote some postcards. It was the ideal relaxing day. I had no worries on my mind. Not even honeybadgers and monkeys. Or iguanas.

After lunch, David Bunn gave us a lecture on Kruger National Park’s history and politics surrounding it. We talked about rhino poaching and elephant herd culling (some conservationists think that elephants are overpopulating Kruger and destroying the trees and are consequently posing a threat to biodiversity so some herds should be eliminated…which aside from being controversial is way easier said than done). It was the most relaxed lecture I’ve ever had in my life. We were all sitting on a blanket in the shade under a tree in our t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, listening and writing notes in our journals. I was fascinated and asked a million questions and had a million more but felt as though I should stop asking so that we could go get ready for our evening game drive.

I sat up in the front of the very large safari vehicle we took for our night drive. I sat next to the driver who was one of the rangers from the morning walk. We saw a wildebeest herd. And lots of waterbuck families and they look so cute. We saw elephants and zebras too. Zebras were basically beginning to feel mundane too at this point. Almost like impalas, but not quite. Speaking of impalas, it’s impala mating season in South Africa now. So the males are fighting over harems of females. We got to see a couple males fighting on this drive, and you could hear the horns crashing. It was amazing! We also saw some little vervet monkeys in the road. There were probably about 30 or 40 of them. They scurried up a tree and there was a baby holding onto the bottom of a swaying branch and it was cartoon comical. We saw giraffes too of course, but those would never get old to me. They are so awkwardly majestic. We even saw another jackal!

Monkeys in the road.

Gives a whole new meaning to 'blue balls.'

Make room for me on this branch please!!

At one point, we had a “bathroom break” but there were hippos in a nearby watering hole, so he had to walk around with his rifle ready for any impending danger. Fortunately I didn’t have to pee in a bush that time, but a lot of people did. Stressful, huh?!

Our driver, Irving, had the most impressively keen ability to find animals. It was ridiculous. Even when it was dark, he had a bright light that he held in his right hand and stuck out the window and waved it back and forth, and he was able to pick up a chameleon in a tree on the left side of the vehicle, he was able to detect a large spotted genet (google it…it was too dark for pictures) sitting in a tree off to the side of the road just from the reflection of its eyes.

Sorry it's blurry. Night settings on camera...

We were all really disappointed we hadn’t seen any cats yet. So this poor ranger had a lot of pressure on him to deliver a cat to us. Unfortunately he never succeeded, however, he had something almost as good. Maybe even better. We came across a hyena den along the side of the road. There were two adults: a mom and an aunt. And then about five or six babies. I was too distracted by their cuteness that I forgot to count. Hyena pups are about the most curious thing there is, so they came up to the vehicle and sniffed around and even started climbing up the stairs to the vehicle. It was insane!