Africa - Day 5 - Timbavati, South Africa - "Who needs a weapon? He has two arms."

Day 5 - Timbavati, South Africa

5:30 am wake-up call and sadly, no elephants reported wandering through camp overnight.  We did, however, learn that at about 4am, a female lion did meander through...  The paths in our camp are all sand and they are raked every night.  Apparently, there were lion tracks spotted in the morning, so, I suppose that is a good justification for why they need to escort us to our rooms at night…

Quick pre-breakfast and off we went.

Sunrise photo, bundled up

I don't think I mentioned anything about the weather, but mornings are COLD and I’m typically bundled up in about 5 layers plus buff for my ears and fleece mittens, plus we get blankets (the vehicles are completely open).  The weather typically starts in the low 50's (plus wind) and gets up to the 80's by mid afternoon.  I think.  Understand that everything is metric and we had to do a lot of back of the napkin approximations.

We started the morning by heading to the buffalo eating lions to see if we could find them in daylight hours.  When we heard that one was active, we headed to the kill spot.  We knew we were getting close when we spotted the birds of prey all gathering to watch for the lions to leave.

The buffalo was mostly gone at that point and one lion was very proudly laying down surveying his kill zone.  We got some amazing pictures of the lion in the light and its belly was so distended from the feeding, he could hardly move. 

Lion and what was left of water buffalo

Too much eating - so tired

Look at the food baby

We moved on and saw some more giraffe and a steenbok, which is another antelope animal, but very small.  This particular animal cracks me up because of how Richard described its defense system.  Basically if it spots a predator or gets scared and does not think it can outrun the threat, the steenbok will drop into the grass and lay really still and hope the predators will not notice it – they are only about 2’ tall so they can blend in pretty easily; however, if a predator or other threat gets too close, the steenbok will spring straight up and right in front of the threat, basically scaring the sh*t out of it, and while the threat is getting its bearings, the steenbok will take off and escape.  Richard has said he’s nearly had a heart attack on nature walks when these tiny little WTFs jump out at him.

Our other morning adventure was going in search of white rhino as we had heard there were some in the area.  FYI - white rhino are gray.  Not sure where the "white" part comes from.  We tracked for a while using some other guides on the radio for help.  Of course, when I say "we", I mean that Richard and Jacky were talking and tracking while the rest of us sat in the back anticipating what was coming next.  I've noticed that the guides and trackers all have certain habits - typically they speak in English, but every now and then they switch to what I believe is Afrikaans.  More on this later, but basically when they don't want the tourists to know what they are talking about, they change languages.

Another thing I haven't really mentioned is the terrain.  I had no idea what to expect but somehow had envisioned open plains and herds of animals running.  South Africa is not like that at all - that type of landscape is found in Tanzania (hopefully one of our upcoming adventures).  SA is much more rugged and is considered "bush".  Basically there are dirt paths or roads that criss-cross thousands of miles.  Some roads are obvious, others are much less traveled and have more brush growing in them.  And then there is off-roading.  While we do find animals near the road, many more are spotted deep in the bush - which is why these Defenders are so awesome.  We can literally just plow through the bush and head almost anywhere.  We later learned that there are some trees that are okay to plow over and others that we must go around.  Poor Jacky - we plowed through a LOT of trees.

Back to the rhinos.  We eventually turned off road, followed some tracks, and found a family – male, female and baby, although Richard said the "dad" was not actually the true baby daddy.  The extent of knowledge these guides have with respect to animals, mating habits, pack vs territorial behaviors, etc. is unbelievable.  Rhinos in the wild are truly impressive huge animals and a baby anything – including rhino – is really cute. 



Rhinos don't do much, so we watched for a while until they wandered off...

...and then stopped for our coffee and snack break.  Can't go too long without food here!  Lord knows we do not go hungry.  Today we stopped in a dry river bed and had our break while we took in spectacular scenery.

During our break between drives, we took a short nap, ate two entire meals, and tried to get some walking in.  There is literally nowhere to exercise and not much in the way of safe real estate inside the property to walk, but we walked back and forth exploring.  Remember, there are no fences so there is no official boundary so whatever we see on the outside can at any time make its way to the inside.

So how do we know that animals wandering in is not just folklore or something that happens now and then?  Well, there is evidence in the form of poop.  There is no clean-up crew in the bush - if an animal poops, it stays until it decomposes or something else comes and eats it (on property, they do clean it off the paths and common areas), so suffice to say that when we are out on game drives, there is animal poop absolutely everywhere, so that means that animals are everywhere at some point.  What was amazing to me was how much elephant poop was on property – that means that the elephants were definitely there at some point.  

Richard told us a story of how an elephant had wandered in and was standing in front of our decorative bone fence and chomping on the tree in our front yard.  The people in our room (with a glass front door) basically woke up and saw this giant elephant head right in front of the door.  I guess that would be a whistle blowing emergency.

Damon took advantage or our giant bath tub while I sat outside writing this blog in our front yard (no elephants).  After luxuriating in his bubble bath, Damon joined me on the porch and noticed that there were little vervet monkeys jumping all over our trees. 

Monkey in the middle PLUS the tree
(right)  the elephant was eating

We watched them for a while and eventually I walked out past our privacy gate to see a giant male Nyala basically in front of our door eating a bush just a few feet from Damon.  We followed it to the pool – apparently it is a regular and is probably the same one we saw on the first day.  

 The lodge offers a nature talk every day so we went to check it out – this one was presented by a guide and professional photographer on the topic of how to take better photos of animals.  We realized that we were breaking pretty much every animal photography rule and vowed to take better photos in the future.  Anticipate where the action is headed so you don't miss it in frame; don't cut off the animals feet, legs, horns, tails, trunks; the rule of thirds - don't put the action smack in the middle of every picture, make sure to get the eyes - they make every picture more exciting.  Going back through our pictures, we definitely broke all of the rules - very hard to remember when you are caught up in the moment!  Our theory has always been, take 600 pictures of the same thing and one of them is bound to turn out!

Me practicing my new photo techniques.  Damon has legs.

At 3:30, we left for our evening drive.  Damon was very excited...

Richard told us earlier in the day that he was going to have a surprise for us.  We drove for a bit until we got to the area he was looking for and he and Jacky hopped out and started looking for tracks.  We learned that a pride of lions had been spotted in the area earlier in the day.  The pride supposedly had about 7 females, or as I refer to them, “lady lions” and possibly a few cubs.  The idea of tracking is to look for footprints in the sand to try to figure out what direction they are walking. 

Fresh lady lion footprints

There are huge sections of bush in between the roads so you have to use a process of triangulating the animals by driving up and down the roads looking for tracks.  If you cannot find tracks, logic dictates they are somewhere between the last road with tracks and the road without.  We drove back and forth and back and forth looking for tracks.

Its not like there is someone grooming the sand leaving perfectly fresh paw prints - there are thousands of footprints everywhere, the sand is loose - how Richard and Jacky could identify any footprint, let alone those from a pride of lions that is recent, is beyond me.  All six of us in the vehicle were anxiously peering out onto the road looking for tracks, because clearly 2 days of sitting in a safari vehicle makes us experts on tracking lady lions.  Needless to say, we were not all that helpful.

At one point, we dropped off Jacky so he could walk into the bush where we last spotted paw prints and track on foot.  We asked if he had a weapon or even a flashlight to which Richard responded, nope – he has two arms.  Hey - I'm just going to go by myself into the dense brush looking for 7 lions with nothing but my arms.  I think not.

We searched for those damn lions for 3 ½ hours (and when I say we, it was Jacky in the bush while we drove around hoping for a miracle) during which time we saw an awesome sunset,

an owl in the middle of the river bed,

a stealthy elephant hiding in the bush,

a buffalo (which we thought might be dinner for the lions, we checked out the night sky, listened to Africa noises, and looked for any sign of those lions.  There is something a bit surreal about stopping in the dark, turning out the lights, and just listening in the pitch black.  We stopped for our wine and beer sun-downer in the river bed just at dusk where we finally picked up Jacky again.  Because the only thing worse than leaving Jacky out there unarmed was doing it in the dark. Although he didn't seem to mind at all.

The sundowner spread

Me and my fancy wine cup

During our break when I had to go to the bathroom - Richard offered good advice "keep an eye out, there is a pride of lions out there somewhere".  Hmm, good to know.  But hey, I'll be fine.  I have two arms.  Jacky had tracked the pride all over the place - they had turned and were completely out of the area we had been searching by Land Rover.  As it was pretty dark out at this point, our likelihood of finding them was dwindling quickly. 

In my opinion, the day was sort of turning into a bust and it was hard not to be disappointed, but we still had a good time with our Argentinian and German safari mates.  You definitely get a chance to know people when spending 8 hours a day sitting in a car together (plus meals).  Even after it got dark, we continued the search with a spot light, hope fading fast.  Richard was finally ready to throw in the towel and head back to the lodge and told Jacky we were going to do one last loop.  Remember, we had been searching (in the wrong place) for 3 1/2 hours and it is now pitch black out.

Video of lady lion tracking in the dark

You know where this is going, right?  On the last road of our last loop just as we were about to give up, what do we see but the entire pride of lions laying in the middle of the road in front of us.  It was pretty awesome – 6 lady lions and 1 young male sort of curled up and sleeping in two big heaps. 

Our pictures are not great as the lighting was just a spotlight in the pitch black, but given how long we had been searching, it was a sweet reward. 

After a few minutes, the pride stood up one by one and slowly walked off into the bush.  It was too dark and too dense for us to follow, so we tried to catch them crossing the road again, but alas, that was our only sighting.  We later learned that the lady lion that had walked through our camp the night before was most likely part of this pride.

To give you somewhat of an understanding of how amazing these trackers are – it is pitch black at night.  We have the vehicle head lights and Jacky on the front of the truck with a hand held spotlight that quickly scans both sides of the road.  At one point, he points his light and said “porcupine” – probably 100 feet or more, across a field and a dry river bed, we see a small blob of brown in the dark moving in the brush - that was the porcupine that he picked out of the darkness with a brief scan of his flood light. 

Happy with our ride, we headed back for dinner.  Our safari group dined together again, enjoyed good food and wine, and as per usual, headed off to bed at about 9:30 or 10 fat, happy and exhausted.  Yes, we felt just like a lion that had spent two days eating a buffalo.

More bug pictures.  The albino mantis found in my hair at dinner last night.  The giant cricket, not found in my hair, but on our glass bathroom door, so basically it stared at us while we were doing our business.