Don't be the wildlife, South African version

The animals at Kruger National Park in South Africa, just a few hours away from Swaziland, were amazing!  If you ever have the chance to go, take it.....or let me know, & I'll keep a list of people to take with me when I come back someday.  In any case, here are some of our favorite pictures & brief stories to go along with them.  To start the day, we actually got flooded out of our desired-entry gate. The river was too high & had flooded the road, closing the entrance gate we had intended to use.  So, we drove back out to the highway & down a little ways further to the Malalane entrance gate.  At first it seemed an annoyance, but we had a pretty incredible day that would have turned out far differently if we had come in a different gate - - so it all worked out for the best.

The first animal sighting was, of course, impala - because there are thousands of them (by far the most animals in the park - I don't remember the last census numbers exactly but it was huge).  For the time being, we're going to skip further impala pictures.  Instead, large mammal sighting number one at Kruger was the elephant.  We came upon this guy along the side of one of the main roads in the park.  He was apparently quite hungry - at first he just ate from the shrubbery and shoulder-level leaves.  Then, he got greedy - or extra hungry - or something.....so he pulled down the entire tree to be able to eat the leaves from the top (they are apparently the best - - - the giraffe must know something).  As astounding as it was to watch him pull down the tree with his trunk, the sound of the trunk (yes the trunk, not a branch - - mind you, it wasn't a huge tree) snapping was pretty cool too.

After a little while, the elephant disappeared into the bush (probably looking for more appropriate trees - or maybe some of his friends as it is apparently not particularly common to see just one elephant on his own).  Our next major animal sighting was a herd (a few herds, really) of animals: zebras & impala & rhinos (yes, rhinos!) - we believe they were white rhinos (the more common of the two) though we're obviously not experts (yet).  We watched those groups of animals for quite a while & then moved on.  Not far down the road was another up-close-and-personal animal group for us - more rhinos! The second set may have been black rhinos (we need to go back and look to compare the jawliens), which are much more rare at Kruger.  There were 2 of them, just hanging out on the side of the road - one or two car-lengths away - chomping on the brush & leaves lining the road.  We sat and watched them for 15-20 minutes, snapping pictures & talking about it.  Again, hearing the sounds of the heavy animals moving around & doing their thing was cool.  As we sat, Mac & Nancy were telling us a little about rhinos (apparently they are responsible for a surprisingly high number of human deaths - not very many, but high relative to what people would expect).  They are very docile until provoked, at which point they fiercely charge.  All the talk of charging rhinos started to put Carter a little on edge and after a little while she thought she was ready to go....Nancy turned around to look at us & just started laughing because Carter was taking pictures with an apple core in her mouth.  It doesn't all make for a great story (at least as I tell it), but one thing led to another & Carter bust out laughing by the window & the rhinos finally moved.  Luckily for Carter, it was not to charge but just deeper into the shrubbery for more food - they did give us a very good audience for a while though!

I know I said no impala pictures - but I had forgotten these young bucks we came across, trying to grow into their manhood.  Among the many groups of impala we saw, this one had many bucks together (male-bonding time apparently).  This pair of young guys was feeling playful....they went back and forth mock-fighting several times....until the senior buck bossman came along & scooted everyone on their way.  He didn't have time for the foolish games....either that or he was just sick of us watching them all.

Among my favorite animals of the day were the giraffes - they're quite impressive.  I'm not sure if it's the spots or the height or what, but they were amazing to watch pick at the leaves off of the very tops of the trees.  Carter had the first spotting, one guy by himself eating by a bunch of impala.  Then later I finally got my first big animal spotting when we came across 2 giraffes by the side of the road.  Initially there was one on each side - we seemed to interrupt their crossing the road (there must be an old elementary school joke there somewhere..."why did the giraffe cross the road?).  So we waited a little while & sure enough, the guy on the left moved over & both of them started eating from the trees on the right.  It's kind of silly I suppose, that we would get such a kick out of watching a giraffe cross the road, but we did.  If only Mac & Nancy had secretly recorded the conversations & comments in the car, you would all find some amusement in them, I'm sure!

We stopped at one of the "camps" where you can either visit for the day or stay for the night to have lunch & stretch our legs a bit.  We heard the hippos more than we saw them, but we did get to watch a pair of elephants in the river have their playtime.  Carter & I had actually spied the elephants earlier in the riverbed as we were driving up to the camp though Mac thought we were crazy because we couldn't see them again in the riverbed until just before we pulled off to the camp.  At the point of this pic, the elephants had already hydrated on the other bank/sandbar & then walked across towards the tree for playtime.  After this shot, one of the elephants intentionally just plopped himself into the river - unfortunately, I didn't have the right angle for a picture of that. 

We had a slight disaster with lunch - first they didn't bring Nancy's food, & then they brought the wrong food for Carter.  In the end, though, everyone ate (some faster than others) & we hit the road again.  After lunch (which we didn't really stop for until 2 or so), we were on a tighter schedule as the rules of Kruger are that you have to be either out of the park or in a camp (with a reserved spot) by 6pm.  If you're not, there are large fines.  So, based on where we were at that time in the park, we only had a few options for getting ourselves out in time to avoid the fines.  We did, though, still manage to see a number of animals on our pseudo-race to the gate.  We finally managed to spy a few monkeys in the trees & a baboon mother with 4 or 5 babies (Mac said they probably weren't all hers) playing on a low branch.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get any great shots of them.  Turns out, that was okay, as the next 5km or so we came across several large groups (herds? packs?) of baboons.

Mac told us a story of a baboon who used to hitchhike up and down the road in Kruger - hop on the hood or trunk of a car & ride a while, then hop off & head back the other direction.  The first group of baboons we saw didn't look that mischievous - though there was a little one cart-wheeling his way down the road.  Mac was telling us how they're known to jump into a car window every now and again as we watched & snapped pictures.  Then - out of no where - papa baboon comes racing up, chasing after someone - roaring and baring his fangs/teeth.  Carter insisted that we roll the windows back up at that point!  We went along, seeing a few more episodes of arguing papa baboons - not sure if it was a territory thing or a food thing - and several mom/baby pairs in various situations - cleaning one another, eating, playing.  Here are a few sample pics of these wildy human-like creatures.

More pictures to come later....just building the anticipation ;)