"I miss the rains down in Africa"
-Toto
We traveled to a new camp this afternoon. It’s been raining lightly which has broken some of the heat. We are staying on what is mostly an upscale tent along the Sabbe River. I am sitting on a make shift porch overlooking that river. You can hear hippos snorting and burping in the river. Baboons are everywhere.
The African Chacma Baboon is a very social creature. They travel in large troops and the group here is no exception. There are large males with very ugly butts, mothers with clinging babies, older males, and various adolescents. They are also like large monkeys who take steroids, dangerous when provoked , and the local thugs. They can and do steal everything.
Boy Baboon: “Dad, will I have a butt like your’s one day?”
Dad: “Yes, son, you will. The girls love it”.
Boy Baboon: “Cool!”
Fun fact about Baboons. They have done studies about the Alpha males. Typically they want the females all to themselves and will fight vigorously for the right to mate. In fact they spend so much time fighting that the geriatric males go unnoticed and many females are impregnated by the older guys while the young stud is off fighting the wars.
So, go Grandpa.
We are now going on game drives alone, just Colleen and I. We soon discovered that the guided tours in the park are not guided at all. Just a big open air truck headed down the same roads. No trackers. No radios. Just random luck.
We can do that as well. They allow self driving here. So, we took a guidebook and went into the bush with air conditioning in a Rav 4. Colleen brought yogurt and bananas. (She does that). It was wonderful.
Until the big male elephant charged our Toyota.
I should explain.
When you leave for a drive it is very much all about intermittent reinforcement. You can drive in Kruger for an hour or more and see nothing in the thick bush. Then, just when you are ready to give up, an animal appears and you are rewarded with moments of happiness. So you drive on. The ‘guided’ tours are much the same.
We have encountered several large male elephants at the side of the road. They are busy noshing on leaves and pay little attention to you. We park, take pictures, and admire one of God’s greatest creations.
We have learned though that elephants like to move. In our encounters they rarely stay in one place. When you see one in a zoo, no matter how big the enclosure, you lose that sense of how much they want to move. As we observed this big male, we could tell he wanted to cross the road. To my observation, there was a gap in the bush that seemed to me the obvious lane for him to travel. So I backed up to give him room.
It never occurred to me that he does not need a lane. He makes his own lanes and came right through the bush to the passenger side of the car. (Fortunately Colleen was on that side so I figured ‘I was gong to make it’). We were startled and the big guy made threatening gestures. We were blocking his path and he was going to have none of it from us.
We froze. Hearts racing.
Then, he seemed to change his mind and walked in front of the hood of the car indignantly. It was like the scene from Jurassic Park when the T Rex went by. We marveled at the leviathan’s wall of grey wrinkled skin as it filled our windshield and then passed by.
We collected ourselves and moved on. Then....
It happened again.
Hours later we were in another section of the park and in front of us a mother elephant with a baby, that appeared only days old, popped out on the road. We stopped to marvel at the infant and watched the group disappear into the bush.
While we were transfixed looking out the right side of the car there was the trumpet blast of an angry elephant. We turned quickly to the left and, again on Colleen’s side ( I was safe, thank God), not 5 feet from the window were 3 angry males that appeared to be adolescents. The leader trumpeted fury that we were in their way then shoved past the others and struck the left front bumper of the car! They left the road to the opposite side in a huff to join the others.
We just had a fender bender with an elephant!
Although our hearts were racing a bit, everyone is ok. Nature is metal.
As we drove down the road I pulled into a watering hole. We had passed many of these and often they are either empty or have one or two hippos in them. This site was different.
It was very large and from our vantage point we could see a large number of animals streaming out of the bush beyond down to the water’s edge. What was remarkable was that they were mostly huge Cape Buffalo. There were hundreds of them drinking, bathing, and wallowing in the brown mud to cool off from the 100 degree heat.
Joining them were herds of Wildebeest, Zebras, and Impala. Some angry hippos in the pool would get offensive if the Cape Buffalo drew to close.
The pictures shared do NOT do the scene justice.
After watching for an hour, it seemed the party was over. The herds started flowing back into the bushveld. It was a spectacular explosion of life.
It felt like I was watching the morning of creation.
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