sick safari

After a fairly uneventful 6 hour ride, we arrived at our first safari camp - Motswari Lodge, part of the private Timbavati reserve. Unlike many private lodges, Motswari is not fenced, meaning animals can, and as we found out do, just wander through camp at all hours of the day.
Following what felt like the best lunch in the history of lunches, we headed to the meeting point for our first official safari and met our guide, Godfrey, and our tracker, Petros. While we knew these would be the guys responsible for finding and showing us game, we didn't realize how incredibly skilled they were until we were about 25 min into our drive and Godfrey pulled over. He leaned out of the rover and pointed down to the dirt and said "see that?" After looking at a bunch of tire tracks and messed up dirt, he says "hippo tracks - fresh hippo tracks." We proceeded to a nearby watering hole where we found 4 adult hippos and 1 baby hippo soaking in the water. We thought this was pretty awesome, but in retrospect this was kind of meh.

Shortly after our hippos, we arrived at another watering hole where we saw a couple elephants and heard a bunch more. We pulled into a little clearing on the road and saw about 10 elephants, including a baby, wandering around munching on trees. By far the scariest moment occurred as Godfrey was telling us about elephants urinating and he made some joke about this elephant right next to us being a male. As he was chuckling, this male, which was about 15-20 feet away, turned and made a few quick, threatening steps toward us. The rover was turned off, and Godfrey quickly swung back into his chair, had his hand on the ignition, and muttered a quick and panicked uh oh. Jen about shat herself as she was the closest to the elephant. Turns out the elephant didn't want to harm us, he just wanted to go to the bathroom as he proceeded to let both liquids and solids fly. Scary, smelly, and funny.

After having the rest of our group brought to us, we stopped in a slightly open area and had sundowners (drinks and snacks). The rest of our group consisted of 4 Americans, all mid-50ish, 2 from NYC and 2 from DC. The 2 guys played soccer together in college at Bucknell and had been to something like the last 5 WCs. One of the guys was media, so they stayed with the team and family outside Joburg (we never did enquire about which media outlet he worked for). The rest of this drive was fairly uneventful - a few elephants, lots of impala and other antelope-like things.

The next day we were awoken by a gentle knock on our front door at 5:30 - this was how they got everyone awake for 6am coffee and tea and a 6:30 drive departure. This morning drive was far and away the best of our drives. After about 40 min, Godfrey and Petros picked up on some leopard tracks. Rather than just follow them in the rover, Petros hopped out of his perch, grabbed a walkie talkie, and took off behind us. Godfrey explained that he was going to track the leopard, we would continue on, and when he found the leopard we'd go see it. Again, Petros walked away with a walkie talkie. That's it. No gun, no signal flare, nothing. Nuts. We drive a bit and Godfrey pulls over again and shows us more tracks and quietly says "rhino". We follow them a bit and then he stops and gets out and walks around looking at them. As he's getting back in, I ask how many rhino because there were quite a few tracks. He says "it looks like 2 females being followed by 1 male" and we're all like AWESOME! We drive some more, he talks on his walkie talkie, and eventually we stop - it's coffee time! We drinks coffee and hot chocolate and eat biscuits and then hop back into the rover after 20 min (still no Petros). Eventually we come across Petros, standing in the middle of the road, motioning his walkie talkie into the bush. He hops back into his perch, and Godfrey turns the rover off the road and into the bush. I cannot describe how badass this was. We slowly meander our way around trees and shrubs until we spot our first rhino. As we stop the rover, you can barely see 2 more rhino running down the hill. Godfrey says "those 2, those are the 2 females and this guy is the male following them." Unfreakingbelievable. Not only were we 10 feet from a rhino, but he had correctly told us what we were looking for just by looking at their footprints. Because we were parked off the roads (and I use the term "roads" loosely), he radioed everyone else to tell him what we had found. After about 20 min of watching and following, he told us we had to get going because there were about 7 other rovers heading into the area. Sure enough, on our way out we passed at least 5 heading to see the rhinos Petros had tracked. Totally insane. On the way back we saw 2 more elephants that were older and thus less interested in us, and we were able to get really close. Elephants never get old. We also found several hippos outside of the waterhole, and got to watch them splashing back into the water. Cool stuff.

As our evening drive began, Godfrey asked what we wanted to see and we told him cats. He said ok we'd work on it. After driving around for awhile, we saw more antelope-like things (kudu, steenbok, impala, etc) and then came across 3 water buffalo. He explained that these were 3 older males who probably couldn't keep up with the herd. Sure enough, we later saw about 100+ water buffalo grazing on the side of the road.

It was getting late and we still hadn't seen any cats. Godfrey had been on the radio and informed us (I think) that someone had found some lions and that we were heading over. By this time is was dark (and as we learned dark = cold), and we sped along in our open-topped rover freezing. We came across some lights and it was a rover from another lodge who we had seen before. He and Godfrey spoke, Godfrey thanked him and the guy said enjoy. We drove up a bit and there was another rover just in front of is. In that rover's headlights we saw what appeared to be 5 lions walking in the road. They eventually settled down, and the rover in front of us pulled off the road to the right, and we pulled off the road to the left, and just sat and watched. It was sick. We were literally 6 feet from what turned out to be 6 lions. They didn't really care about us, except for this one who stood up to walk around and Sarah tried to take her picture and Sarah's ridiculously annoying flash went off 7 times like a strobe light. The lion stopped and stared at her, at which point Sarah said (audibly) "ok ok, sorry, I won't do that anymore, ok". The lion kept walking and just stopped and laid down in the road again. Crazy. In one day we had seen rhino, elephant, water buffalo, hippos and lions. Ridonkidonk.

Also, Jen and I had been feeling a little sick since we left Cape Town. That sickness turned into a sweet headcold/sinus infection. And because we're so nice, we shared that with Beth. She started feeling really bad on the night drive, but has been feeling better. Jen and I feel mostly better, but our throats and sinuses are pretty sore and congested, respectively. Awesome.

MO