We got there just in time for a little lunch before the afternoon game drive. Game drives are held every morning at 5:30am to around 9:00am. That's when the guests get breakfast. At 11:00am there is a "bushwalk" where you head out of the lodge with a ranger on foot (a forbidden activity otherwise.) On a typical day, you come back from the bushwalk ready for a nap in your nice, comfortable rondavel:
At 2:00pm you grab a leisurely lunch while you wait for the 3:30pm game drive to begin. You head out in the Land Rover for another 3.5 hours, watching the sunset from a scenic point along the way. The rangers even pack along a "sundowner", a beverage you specify before you leave.
The ranger drives the Land Rover and a tracker sits on a special seat on the hood looking for animals. Sometimes the Land Rover drives straight over small trees. Most of the time it's the dead or thorny ones so I don't mind, but the poor tracker basically acts as a bumper before these plants are plowed under.
Some animals are deep in the bush, while others are right in the middle of the road. Not 3 minutes into our first drive, our road was blocked by this Yellow-billed Hornbill in the midst of eating an apparently scrumptious scorpion.
Once the Hornbill, the pigeon of the bush, finished his meal, we headed off for the rest of our afternoon drive. A few moments later we saw this cute little mongoose. He'd be one of many we would see along our drives.
As a side-note: the camera we got as a wedding-present for the trip is fantastic! The 20X optical zoom has been essential for sooo many game drive photos. Most people out here seem to have really expensive SLR cameras, but it seems like only half of them really know how to use them. If I had gotten an SLR, I would have been one of the bumbling half, and most of the animal pictures would have been a blur. With a high-end point and shoot, however, I was able to tweak the settings when I had time, and to go for super-easy "a-computer-can-do-it-better-than-you" mode when the subject was darting across the screen.Our prize sighting of the day though, was Salayexe, the leopard. A lot of these animals are territorial, and thus the rangers will see them time and again on drives, which they do morning and night for six weeks straight before getting a two week vacation. In any case, they often give the cats in particular names. They even have monthly newsletters so that fans can keep up to date on the latest antics of their favorite animals.
Our first view of Salayexe wasn't picturesque. In fact we barely saw her before she wandered down into the riverbed out of sight of our Land Rover. Thats when Richard (our ranger) and Clement (our tracker) hopped off the vehicle, leaving the six eco-tourists alone in the middle of the bush.
The payoff was worth it though, because they were able to track her back to her two cubs (not yet named.)
The cats are typically named after 10 months. I imagine that 10 months is about the time when they leave their mother and the rangers are relatively sure they'll be able to make it on their own. If you name them earlier, I imagine it would be even sadder if one got eaten by a hyena. Sometimes, in an interesting twist on Darwanism, the cubs will be taken out by a male leopard (not the father), and the killer will mate with the newly childless mother. Anyway, all we saw was a happy leopard family resting in a riverbed, and that was perfectly fine by me.
We hopped out of the Land Rover and had our sundowners by a small waterhole where we watched a lone hippo snorting about. Apparently this guy was sort of an older hippo that got pushed out of a bigger waterhole a few kilometers away. And so the soap opera of the South African bush goes on...
Some buffalo stopped by the waterhole as we finished up our drinks. It's amazing how confident an animal is when there's water between you and it. Well, actually, these buffalo were not worried about us anyway I guess, given that they could flatten us pretty quickly if they had deemed us worthy of their time.
Altogether it was an extraordinary first drive, and to top it off, we got back to our room to find a bottle of Champagne waiting for us, complements of Elephant Plains.
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