South African Safari: Thursday

It rained pretty hard on Wednesday night and continued into Thursday morning, so we woke up to a cooler, wetter game drive. Ephraim had fleece lined ponchos to keep up warm and they were sent from Heaven! Although hardly any animals were out because of the wind and rain we did manage to see a giraffe, some zebra, and a lot of fresh muddy animal tracks including: lion, gnu, impala, gecko, and hippo. 

After the morning drive we packed up our things, ate brunch, settled with management, bought be a Cheetah Plains souvenir in the form of a baseball cap, and headed back out onto the treacherous dirt road, now muddy from all the heavy rains. We caravan-ed with Heinz and Elsbeth just past the townships, and then headed towards the Johannesburg airport while they headed to drive the Garden Route and continue Heinz birthday South Africa adventure. 

As I said before, we stayed at the Cheetah Plains Private Game Reserve, Sabi Sand at Kruger National Park. I cannot say enough good things about this place, if you ever go on a South African safari I HIGHLY recommend Cheetah Plains! The staff was amazing! They catered to my crazy food allergies which was a huge blessing. Our guide, Ephraim, was the best ever, he was an expert tracker and was knowledgeable about all the animals, birds, and flora. We saw every animal on our list, including the Big 5: elephant, rhino, buffalo, leopard, and lion. It was such an amazing experience to see such beautiful animal out in their natural habitat; no fences, no one feeding them, pure wild. One night as we were leaving our hut to go to dinner we walked outside to an elephant not 30 feet away from us, just on the other side of the electric fence that was the lodge boundary! 

We definitely had some rookie experiences. Such as our camera lens fogging up, which us being new to photography in general didn't exactly know how to handle! We ended up just letting it dry out before using our camera, luckily on Wednesday morning the fog on the lens cleared up just in time for the lions big debut! 

It was also interesting to experience the different dialects of the natives in South Africa. The Republic of South Africa has 11 official languages! How crazy is that!? Luckily English was one of them, so communication wasn't an issue, but it was funny how different English there is! Instead of saying "okay", people say "ya-ya" and "cool" a lot. To "scheme" doesn't have the negative connotation it does here, it simply means "to plan", nothing menacing implied. They don't send "texts" they send an "SMS", and instead of saying "text me", we heard a lot of people saying "give me a tinkle"...which yeah, totally different meaning here huh? Diapers are "nappies", which I personally like. Oh, and stop lights? "Robots"...that one took some getting used to, and honestly I hardly could contain my laughter every time someone giving us directions would say "turn right at the second robot"; I just kept imagining R2-D2 standing on the corner! Another thing I rather liked was that instead of Zebra [zee-bruh] they used the pronunciation Zeb-ruh (I wish American English was as pretty as South African English).

We had the most amazing trip, and feel so blessed to be able to have gone, especially at this crazy time in our lives! I feel a new appreciation for God's creations, and a new respect for the wild and untamed. 

This world that our Heavenly Father has created is so beautiful, and so perfect! 

South African Safari: Wednesday

Wednesday was a big day for us on our Safari as we finally caught up with our lion friends we'd been tracking! We saw a good sized pride that was an interesting composition: three younger males, and two females. They were just like super massive lazy cats, and they reminded of us our lazy Coco and Indy back home! The young males had funny little mohawk manes, and you could see on the females some scaring from hunting incidents (you know, because the lady lions are the bread winners). 

We saw a couple elephants, a small pack of wild dog pups who had been abandoned by their mother (they were soooo sweet, I wanted to take them home with us...even though apparently wild dogs are extremely vicious and aggressive), and PUMBA (who was super anti-social and refused to stick around long enough for a photo). 

 I should mention here how incredibly stupid that safari rig is right there. Being that close to any elephant in the wild is incredibly dangerous. In fact, elephants have caused several human deaths in Kruger National Park, as well countless damage to vehicles of people on "self-safaris". People think they are so gentle and assume that because of this they won't hurt them. However, if you happen to be in the road this close to a mama between her and her baby, she can flip your vehicle over without thinking about if she feels you're threatening her or her baby. They are magnificent though, just keep your distance and respect the animals.

Unfortunately our camera battery died right after our encounter with the wild dog pups. And Taylor and I, being the rookies that we are, left our extra (fully charged, might I add) batteries at the lodge. So for the remainder of our morning game drive we used my phone, which luckily I had brought along to take video! Thank goodness, because we ran into Zebra, Wildebeest or Gnu, and Impala! Who, we learned, clump together and follow each other around when grazing because it's easier to avoid predators (and to escape them) they more of you there are, safety in numbers! So, here's an iphone photo dump for you enjoyment (all from our morning game drive)

We were soooo tired after our exciting morning drive, and after brunch we crashed in our little hut. We pretty much slept all afternoon, and woke up in time to take a little hike around the lodge grounds and make it to the main lodge in time for high tea and the evening game drive. Everyone except us and our German friends went home after the morning drive, so for the evening drive and dinner it was just Taylor and I, and our new friends Heinrich (Heinz) and his wife Elsbeth. For high tea we even celebrated Heinz's 50th Birthday, which was the purpose of their trip to South Africa! (Side Story: I'm actually super embarrassed about this, but when Heinz first introduced himself I SWORE up and down he had said Hans, even though Taylor was sure he had said Heinz. I was calling him Hans for the first several game drives before I heard his wife call him Heinrich and I realized the short version was likely Heinz, not Hans.)

These nasty MASSIVE spiders were EVERYWHERE, and whenever Ephraim would go off road we would get their webs all over us. So icky gross, I am NOT a fan...but they're photogenic though so...yeah.

 Elsbeth, Heinrich, and Willem

I think I mentioned before how nice the staff at Cheetah Plains was, right? Anyway, some of the kitchen staff took it upon themselves to make Heinrich a birthday cake for his 50th! And I won't lie, I had like three slices, it was DELICIOUS! So sweet, no!?!?

Our evening game drive a little slower than our others had been, partly because it was rainy and many of the animals had found shelter and hunkered down for the night. We saw a HUGE buck elephant, the biggest I've ever seen! Pumba finally stuck around for a photo, and we saw a funny looking Kudu (which is was we ate on Tuesday night for dinner!). We also hung around and watched a silly little Vervet monkey play around in a tree for a while, I though his butt was bright blue and so funny/cute...until I realized it wasn't his butt, and the red thing wasn't either. Thanks, binoculars.

The real highlight of our evening drive was when our rig got "stuck" in the mud, really really "stuck". We kind of think it was all for the "experience", to be honest...I mean, the truck had four-wheel-drive, and a rear differential. Regardless of if we got stuck on purpose, or on accident, our last evening drive ended up being a good one, we ended with a cutie baby elephant and headed back to the lodge for one of the best dinners of our trip (baby sole with a creamy lemon sauce and grilled peppers, zucchini, and squash! mmmm), and an early bed time so we would have energy for our long drive back to Joburg on Thursday.