Game day

23 Nov 2008:

After a cold 45 minute ride in a tarp-topped, open-sided, high-backed old SUV at the crack of dawn, we arrived in Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve around 6 am excited to see some wildlife! (Note: Hluhluwe is pronounced roughly like “Shlu-shlu-way”, but the “sh” sounds are made with a kind of lisp from the sides of your mouth; it’s a Zulu “hl” thing.) Our guide was a friendly white South African who had (as he often reminded us) spent a great deal of time in the Bush. He spoke reasonably good Zulu and Xhosa (both are local languages with clicks) in addition to Afrikaans and excellent English. He had worked as a ranger in this game reserve for 10 years before transitioning to leading tours; he was either very knowledgeable about the park, it’s history, and it’s flora and fauna (including animal behaviors), or he was a remarkably skilled and lucky BS artist. And his audience was only three on this day: Rachel, myself, and a slightly odd Swedish woman who was also staying at our B&B. The tour vehicle sat 9, so we felt lucky to have a semi-private tour.

Shortly after arriving in the park, before even passing the entrance, we saw a family of vervet monkeys just beginning to greet the day. Some of the young ones were playing, trying to push each other off the low branches of the fig tree they had slept in. That was just a prelude to a fantastically successful day of wildlife viewing; we got very lucky. About 45 minutes in, we saw four of the “big 5” all within 500 meters of each other (lion, rhino, elephant, and buffalo; missing only leopard). The lions we never saw up close; we saw a pride of 9 sleeping on a hillside across a valley perhaps 300 meters off, and later we saw one of the females crossing a river from a couple hundred meters away. Everything else, though, we got up-close-and-personal views of (occasionally too close for comfort!).

Some of the highlights included seeing seven species all converging at the same watering hole: 5 giraffe (one of whom took a drink, a delicate proposition that makes them quite vulnerable), two white rhinos, impala, zebras, warthogs, wildebeest, and one large elephant that flared its ears in challenge and started lumbering towards our open-topped and open-sided vehicle. (This was one of the too-close-for-comfort moments.) He got within 15 feet or so before veering off to the left. Our car was off to keep things quiet, so we would have had a very hard time making our exit had we needed to; the old machine never started on the first try, plus we would have had to reverse up a hill on a dirt road, not ideal conditions for a getaway from a creature that can hit 40 kph! Our guide decided that turning the engine on would startle it, so instead he just held his ground and told us all to be “deathly still”. Fortunately, it all worked out! After he ventured off a bit, he proceeded to scoop up muddy water with his trunk and spray himself all over to cool off (the elephant, not our guide). We also saw a male rhino about 10 feet away off to the side of the road, with a female and child close behind. We tracked them to a watering hole and watched them drink and play in the mud a bit.

After a whole day of this, I felt like I had gotten reasonably good at spotting animals, certainly better than when I arrived in the morning. But we had nothing on our guide, who was truly impressive at spotting things while driving. All told, we had seen so many impala and zebra that we were bored of them by mid-morning; we also saw waterbuck, warthog, white and black rhino, lion, wildebeest, elephant, giraffe, vervet monkey, baboon, buffalo, a large and colorful assortment of birds, and too many dung beetles to count. Our guide also, upon hearing that we were doctors, found a bunch of medicinal plants to show us, which was kinda cool.

Our Swedish companion was, as I said, a bit of an odd duck. Her job was quite interesting; a PhD in social science, she was in South Africa researching the extent to which black natives have been empowered to financially recover after the end of apartheid. But she kept extolling Sweden’s endless virtues in complete non sequiturs. We talked about homelessness, and she’d bust out with “Sweden is very accepting of homosexuals, that’s why nobody there has AIDS.”

During a late lunch back at the entrance to the game reserve, a warthog came traipsing up into the parking lot and came within just a few feet of us and a few other people who were nearby. (This is, in my very limited exposure, quite unusual, as all the other warthogs I have seen here have been very skittish.) A couple of Euro guys who had been busy mugging for pictures by pretending to "wear" antelope horns that were on display decided it would be great fun to get a super-close-up of the warthog. So they got up within 5 feet of the thing, laughing and snapping pix. The hog was pretty obviously getting pissed off, and it started to charge them twice. They laughed and took a couple steps back, then got right back to taking pictures. It was remarkably stupid; warthogs have lower teeth sharp enough to flay your legs open. Anyway, it all ended OK (unless, like part of me, you were actually rooting for the warthog...).

After the day had ended (we got in nearly 10 hours of game viewing!), we (I) drove back home, 3.5 hours which (as has become the custom) culminated in evening rains and mist. But I’m getting more used to that, and to the lack of lights on the roads, and it wasn’t too painful. I even had enough energy left to “watch” the Bears (via intermittent internet updates) again, with better results this time – an easy 27-3 win over a truly awful football team (apologies to any Rams fans that might be lurking… not for calling the Rams “awful” but for what you’ve had to put up with this year….).