Safari (Day 3) Part 1

April 25th

This morning started out on a different safari truck then our "regular" truck with 2 new guides and a new travel buddy for a early morning bush walk. We left our camp ground at 5:30am and were successfully in the middle of nowhere with the sun rising at 6am. We all hopped out of our vehicle and got our instructions as to how this bush walk was going to go. The rules were pretty simple. 1. no talking  2. no stopping  3. stay immediately behind the person in front of you  4. if you need to stop snap your fingers.

The sunrise as we headed to our "trail"

Our guides, Nick & Duane

The rules seem pretty silly because we didn't want to make any animals mad on their turf and if we stopped, the bush was so high, we would never find our group again. It was CRAZY how quickly everything but the person in front of you disappeared and you quickly have no reference points and no idea where you are or how to get back to where you started. There are no trails, signs or anything else. We were just walking around in grass that was well over our head to see what we could find.



Our "trail"

The first part of our walk we saw, studies and talked about poop. Every time we came up to poop, our guide explained what the animal had been eating, when the poop got there and what animal it was from. We even learned (and saw) that poop is used to be smeared around there boundaries/territory to keep others away.

It was fun and a little intimidating to walk around without being able to see much of anything around you. Every once in a while we would come into a clearing and find things like mud holes, spider webs, termite mounds, bones and beautiful views. We even found this one long spider web that was attached so well to the tree that when you pulled it, it moved the entire branch. Don't think I want to mess with those African Spiders.



Spider web



Mud Hole

We were able to see some animals from afar. There were Impala just off in the distances jumping around and making lots of noise and for a little while we tried to track some white rhino. Apparently, rhino have poor eye sight but great smell so we tried to stay down wind of them but were unsuccessful. It would have been cool to get close, but I am happy to get close while in our vehicle instead of on foot.


The rhino we tracked

I think the wildest, craziest, saddest thing we saw was this...

A rhino skull. No big deal, right? Animals get eaten and hunted by other animals all the time. The sad thing about this was that you could tell that this rhino had been poached. If you look closely at the skull you can see where they cut off the horns. We learned a lot about rhinos, becoming extinct, & the reasons for them being poached. Just makes me want to hug a rhino or have one as a pet but we know how well that would go.

As we were headed out of the bush, we got to see wildebeest in the distances. They looked pretty big so I am glad we didn't run into them on our walk.

It wasn't long before it was time to head back to camp, we were able to see all of that and get back to camp before breakfast! So we still had plenty of time to find all kinds of new animals, watch animals we had been seeing for the past two days and explore other parts of the park.

We got back to camp, met up with Mark, grabbed a quick bit to eat for breakfast and we were back on our safari vehicle and out in the park in no time. It was a BIG day in the park for us so in an effort to not make this 3rd day post too long, I will end it here and pick it up in the next post...

Safari Day 3... to be continued.