Day 29, Year 6 Kruger, Day 2-Big 5 minus 1 plus 2
Date: Monday, November 22, 2010
Weather: Beautiful, Sunny Day
Location: Kruger National Park, South Africa
Today we added cheetah and hippos to our list, but that leopard is still lurking somewhere out of our view. This day was all about seeing a mother cheetah with her three babies early in the morning, then stumbling upon a pride of ten sleeping lions right beside the road, and seeing a baby hippo at the end of the day, as well as the big mommas and papas. The adrenaline was running high after seeing the cheetahs and the lions and it took much of the rest of the day for us to settle down. We left Crocodile Bridge Camp at first light at 4:30 in the morning and by 8:30 am we had seen a herd of twenty to thirty elephants, three different kinds of antelope, two different groupings of dwarf mongoose, with the highlight being the beautiful mother cheetah crossing the road right in front of the car and then seeing her three bouncing little cubs coming behind her. They ran and climbed and put on a delightful show for us while the mother quietly disappeared into the bush. They quickly followed, but not before we were able to get great photos of the babies.
Our goal for the day was to leave Crocodile Bridge camp in southeast Kruger and drive diagonally all the way across the park to the western border, turn north, then back east to Skukuza Camp for the night. It meant a lot of driving, but it paid off in wildlife sightings. There is one main road that runs north south and divides the park into eastern and western sections. When we reached that main road we had to drive south in order to pick up the next gravel road that would take us to the western boundary. While driving south on the main road, we literally stumbled upon a pride of lions. We saw a couple of cars stopped on our side of the road, so we pulled over to have a look. We were searching through the brush to see what we could see in the distance when we realized that lions were sleeping not even twelve feet away from us. If the other cars had not been stopped, we are not sure we would have seen them. They were just TOO obvious. There was a young male lion and a group of females in one body pile, three more in another body pile, and the dominant male sleeping a few yards away from the others. At first it looked like they were all dead. There was absolutely no movement. But then one would twitch, another would toss her head, and yet another would sit up for a second and then just absolutely and instantly collapse. The dominant male rolled over onto his back at one point with his feet up in the air and instantly went back to sleep. We all got a chuckle out of that. It was so exciting to see these magnificent creatures up-close, but after a half an hour we saw that they were out for the count and we traveled on. We traveled west across the park in hopes of seeing roan and sable, two different antelopes that are hard to find but should have been in that area. We were not successful, but we did manage to have a nice lunch at the Pretoriuskop Camp on Kruger’s western boundary. From there we headed north and then east to Skukuza Camp. After checking into our guest house for four at Skukuza, we headed to a close-by hide looking out over Lake Panic. What a great place for wildlife sightings in the late afternoon. Here we saw hippos at a distance but one mother and baby floating in the reeds very close to the hide. We also saw a mother green-backed heron trying to protect her baby from a monitor lizard (quite an interesting show) and many birds. At day’s end we returned to Skukuza and enjoyed the very nice accommodations in the guest house with Ed and Lynne.
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| 101122 Day 29 South Africa–Kruger Day 2 |
