Today was our trip to Kruger National Park.  We woke up early waiting to hear word of a sick young giraffe on a nearby farm.  However, this turned into (yet another :p) lesson of the "hurry up and wait" philosophy of game capture. They never could find the little bugger, so we just shrugged and headed off to the park.  It's roughly the size of Israel and home to a ton of various species, with no hunting and little enough direct interaction with the critters.

We started off pretty quickly, with a bunch of vervet monkeys at the gate, a family of warthog and a young and lonely looking bull elephant along the road. Things slowed down a bit after that, mainly featuring impala and wildebeest with the odd zebra mixed in.  We commented on how quickly we ended up jaded with some wildlife... seeing zebra out of the car is so much less thrilling once you've jumped on top of one to keep it from waking up, or had it kick you or a trailer roll away with you and the zebra in it.  Some giraffe wandered by too, but we pretty much arrived at the first rest stop wondering where all the critters had gone. 

Pretty soon after, we picked things up a bit.  We came to a bridge and a troop of baboons playing in the water.  There were also three nice looking Waterbuck on the far side, and a few steenbuck not too far away once we were over the bridge.  Weird little things, steenbuck are the only antelope that will mate for life and only hang out in a paired group. We also started seeing some cool birds, like ground hornbills and a pretty critter called a lilac breasted roller.  The next rest stop was lunch time, which turned out to be a lot more interesting than just a ham and cheese sandwich.

The place where we stopped was a nice restaurant/store/museum complex along a river.  Up and downstream, we could see individual elephant getting a drink.  The pavilions by the restaurant were also home to quite a number of epauletted fruitbats.  Really cute lil' dudes, they're somewhere between our normal little bats and the Aussie flying foxes in size.  They seemed totally oblivious to people eating lunch around the edges of their pavilion  (obviously no tables in the middle... guano's not that good for you).

After lunch, we started seeing some really cool stuff.  We saw, across the river, a bull elephant about to throw down with a large rhino. The elephant was coming towards the water, and the rhino was heading up the bank.  Rhino tossed his head and took a step and the elephant leapt back.  The elephant regrouped and charged a few steps, and the rhino stepped back quickly.  At that point, they had an uneasy staredown for a few minutes.  Eventually, they both seemed to shrug and wander off in opposite directions as if to say "I could totally take you, but I just don't feel like it right now"

After that, we ran across a large troop of baboons in the roadway.  Some of them had babies dangling on their backs or tails, and some of the older babies were chasing each other up and down trees by the roadside.  It was a lot of fun to watch them for a while before moving on.  We also saw a couple of kudu who pretty much  posed for us.  Very striking animals.

The main event of the day came near the end.  We pulled up alongside a dam (lake) that contained quite a number of hippo, doing all the things hippo do.  They were swimming, roaring, snorting, showing off their teeth and generally having a good old time.  We saw a couple of tiny (well... relatively.) babies as well, along with some big birds (grey heron, some sort of stork) by the edges.  There were also plenty of crocs sunning themselves and a few giraffe came down to drink, along with a herd of impala.  Hippos were one of the last things on my to-see list, so that was a lot of fun especially considering that I'd eaten hippo but not seen one yet.

On the way out, we spotted a lioness in the distance!  Too far for really good photos, she was gorgeous through the binoculars and rounded off the day pretty nicely. Louie got us to the gate at 5:29 (they close and start fining you at 5:30) and we headed home.

Quickly running through dinner, we drove up the hill at the farm to meet our new arrival: a four day old orphaned baby giraffe.  The group decided that because of my birthday today and An's tomorrow, we should be the ones to feed her.  She was in a trailer for the night, so it was a bit of climbing and reaching... she also isn't very bright, so I wasn't able to get her to drink much.  An had slightly better luck, but that also involved Johan climbing in the trailer with the giraffe and trying to hold her head so she had to take the bottle.  She is adorable, though, and seeing her out of the trailer in the boma tomorrow should be a lot of fun since she should be a lot more agreeable in those conditions. 

So, only one day left and then more flying than I care to think about... I really don't want to leave yet.  There's so much to do... I should have scheduled the extra week to see more of this place, but I am kinda looking forward to getting home and sleeping for three days :p  Until later,

-Pat