Kruger weekend

Since Kruger isn’t very far away from the Bushwise camp, we decided to go there one weekend after the test we usually have on Saturdays. It is relaxing to get away for a while and we arrived at the Palaborwa Gate at about eleven, after one hour’s drive. The first thing you see is usually elephants and we weren’t disappointed… after just a couple of minutes we had seen both elephants, impalas (below) and kudus. In the afternoon we went down a loop we really hadn’t planned on taking at first, but we are glad we did. First we saw this young rock monitor that didn’t seem to mind us at all! It was crawling around on the ground next to the car minding its own business, awesome!
Around a bend we came upon six lions at a zebra kill! This is truly one of the coolest sightings so far. They were grawling a bit when they got too close to eachother, but they were probably already quite full since they didn’t seem overly bothered. We watched them eat for a while and then they lay down in the shade, panting and digesting their meal. Their bellies were huge and all they wanted to do was sleep, as lions often do. Once in a while one of them took a small bite of the zebra but without any real enthusiasm.

The relaxed pose of the lioness lying on her side with her paw in the tree is absolutely adorable, and she was lying like that for at least an hour without moving much. Unfortunately it was getting late in the afternoon and we still had two hours drive to the Mopani camp in Kruger and so we had to leave them and get going. The next morning we had an encounter with some curious dwarf mongooses that were trying to warm up on this rather cool morning. A short while later we had our road blocked by this huge elephant bull. We had been driving for about an hour on the same road and didn’t want to turn around so we waited to see what he was going to do. Since he was in musth, we didn’t want to get too close. We switched the engine of and hoped that he would pass us or maybe move into the bush again. After ten minutes of indecicive-ness on his part, a car came from the opposite direction, startling him a bit. He turned around and started walking in their direction and they had to reverse a couple of 100 meters. There we were two cars maybe 400 meters apart with an elephant in between. After about twenty more minutes he moved off into the bush in the direction from which he had come. Just before leaving the Kruger on Sunday afternoon we spotted a couple of spotted hyenas next to the road, right on the spot where a leopard had been seen earlier. Since they were eating our guess is that they probably had taken over a kill that had been made by the cat the same morning. After a well needed brake we were heading back to the Bushwise camp for a week of frogs and dangerous game on the schedule.

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