South African Safari; Photoblog
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010Cape Town, South Africa
(If you are using Mozilla Firefox as a browser, click on the pictures to get them scaled right!)
The North-Eastern part of South Africa is known for its wildlife with Kruger Park as possibly the most well known nature reserve in the world. John, Sven, my dad (who was visiting South Africa for two weeks) and me decided to go on a mid-week safari to Kruger Park and surrounding areas, and were lucky enough to see more wildlife than we were hoping for!
I will mostly stick to pictures, but feel like telling this one story that impressed all of us more than anything else on the trip…
The safari contained a 4 hour walk in the wild, which means you follow a heavily armed guide that takes you to a part of the bush with a high density of wildlife.
The rules were easy; You do as I say, you run for anything you die. (Imagine a 2 metres tall South African rugby playing guide armed with a 11mm rifle commanding you this to prepare you for all the fun to come!)
We walked after the guide (Bertus from now on) with a group of about 8 when we suddenly heard something big aproaching from the side and before we realized it we were looking in the eyes of an aggressive 25 year old male elephant, standing at about 8 metres from us.
Freeze, no Flashes no photos… Bertus commanded while pointing his loaded gun at the elephant.
So here are the (unflashed) pictures 
It’s so insanely impressive to stand on your own feet while looking up to such a gigantic animal. The feeling is hard to explain.. but you feel small, very small..and full of adrenaline. Anyway, if you look closely to the elephant you see lines on both sides of his cheeks. Those lines are stress marks.
This bull was stressed out because it was breeding. Without realizing it we walked into a breeding hazard of about 15 elephants. As soon as Bertus noticed we backed out and continued the walk in a safer and more boring part of the reserve.
The encounter with this bull ended with the bull staring at us for about 30 seconds before turning his back to us; back to his harem!
The first day we did game drives in the Balule Reserve, a beautiful 2700 hectares park with open borders to Kruger.
Baby giraffe hanging out with the zebras.
The giraffe is the only animal where researchers discovered clear signs of long term homosexuality and total disregard of the other sex. just in case you were wondering…
We were very lucky to see two white Rhinos at about 10 metres distance!
This young rhino didn’t seem to care at all that a bunch of tourists where staring at him….
Talking about a pussy cat! The lodge we had lunch at the second day had tame leopards walking around…
The buffalo, member of the Big 5. Which is apparently a big thing in safari. How many of the big 5 did you see? was the question we got after each day. I mean elephants, rhinos, lions, buffalos and leopards are probably the nicest animals to see on an African safari but some people seemed to only care about telling their friends at home” they saw the BIG 5” (Americans obviously ;))
The cats were tough to find because the bush was still very vegetated as it was the end of summer. Best chances to see the big cats are in the winter (less vegetation) but we were once again lucky to see a group of lions from very close by!
If those lions would have been laying a bit further away we probably wouldn’t have spotted them.
THE KING OF THE BUSH!
This male lion looked like he just ate a whole zebra…
Thanks to Ivey borrowing me a very good lens for on this camera so I could take some excellent close up shots.
Millions of impalas at the bottom of the food chain in Krugerpark.
a nice Buffalo close up
A young elephant that tought he was a buffalo
Don’t look for too long or you’ll turn blind…
Waterbok, apparently not tasty at all!
Posing zebras in krugerpark. Krugerpark is about as big as Belgium!
Crossing elephants.
Lucky shot of the trip! Look carefully and see that the elephant is trying to catch the parasite bird with his slurf?
They came so close we could almost touch them.
Wildebeast. So ugly they’re beautiful.
They didn’t let us take this baby zebra home 
Sunset in Krugerpark…
We caught this young bull elephant destroying a couple trees on our last morning drive.
He was playing games with us, pretending he couldn’t see us! Tricky elephant…
But at a certain point he had enough of our audience and came running after us to chase us away.
I have a couple more hippo, crocodile and bird pics that need some cropping since they were from a bit further away, so they’re for the next blog.
Hope you enjoyed the pics, we sure enjoyed the adventure
Take care,
-Veron
