Safari Day 1 4/2

Today was our first safari half day. We flew from Cape Town to a local town of Nelspruit and rented a car to make the drive. The roads were very full of potholes but drivers here are actually very courteous about letting people pass and will drive slowly and pull into the left shoulder. The park itself is one of the most famous in all of Africa, called Kruger National Park and is apparently the size of Israel. We are starting near one of the southern entrances at Numbi gate and will drive up to the middle of the park and exit at Phalaborwa gate.

There are paved roads and dirt roads. We were able to find a map eventually and just picked some random roads to drive down. Little did we know that this would be our most successful day of safari. The Big 5 refers to the elephant, rhino, lion, leopard, and buffalo. We ended up seeing a buffalo, elephant, and rhino all within the first 2-3 hours. Unfortunately the rhino was from very far away.

We finally made it into our first camp, Skukuza, and settled down. You have to be in by 6PM or else you get fined since they don't let people drive around at night. We were living in a bungalow that was actually quite nice. Very clean, no insects at all. In fact all of the facilities are pretty well maintained here. That night we went on a night drive with the game wardens. Didn't see much unfortunately, a brief glimpse of a leopard, a white-tailed mongoose, an owl, and some elephants. But that technically meant we saw 4/5 of the Big 5 in the first day which is not bad given the size of this park.

The impala. The single most common animal in the park. They would often be the only animals we saw even if it was rain or shine.

This was a cool animal: the water monitor. We saw it by the road in a puddle It was trying to catch a fish by using it's body and tail to make a U-shape and wall off an area to force the fish into the shallow and than eat it. The fish managed to escape several times and we got inpatient and drove off.