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So this past weekend was a long weekend for me, I had friday and monday off. On saturday morning I got up at 4am to get into Petoria to catch a bus to Hazyview, about 6 hours away. It is right outside of the southern area of Kruger National Park. It is one of the most famous Game Parks in the world (a "safari" if you will). Very popular since it has the Big 5. The Big 5 are lion, buffalo, leopard, elephant and rhyno. From sat-monday I stayed at a backpackers hostel in Hazyview (actually outside of it) called Gecko Bushpackers. It was gorgous.
So I'm up at 4am again saturday morning to meet my tour guide into the park. The gates open at 5:30am and we get there a few minutes before and wait. It is light enough to see at 5:30 am, but still through the glow of early morning, the sun wasn't quite up yet. After driving into the park for about 5 monutes we come upon a pride of lions. Amazing. Not the same as a zoo that's for sure. the real deal. Wild lions in africa. Cool. They were all female and had a few cubs with them. There are some pictures of them uploaded so check em out. We stay and watch them for about 15 minutes and then head off again. Only another 5 minutes pass when we see 3 rhynos in the road. It was a mom, dad and baby. Huge. Really looks like a dinasour. The mother rhynos dont like the males to come to close to the baby and the female would constantly throw him menancing looks everytime he came close. If he came too close for her liking she would charge at him and chase him off. He always came back though. So after being entertained by them for a while we continue on.
The vehicle we drove around in had open sides and I'll upload a picture of it so you can see what I mean. All of the tour guide wear headsets so that they can let the other tour vehicles know if something is spotted of importance (big five for example). So our guide hears that an Afrian Wild Dog has been spotted and we head over in hopes of seeing it. If you don't know about these animals they are highly endangered and you are incredibly lucky should you ever spot one. Well, it was our lucky day! We head up the orad and this guy was just walking along the orad looking at all of the Impala (a gazelle type animal). He was soooo close and so amazingly beautiful. He stayed insight for a long time. I was amazed. I still can't believe I saw a wild African Wild Dog!!!! After this the animals continued to be plentiful. Which is pretty awesome because everyone who has gone to Kruger kept telling me it's like playing the lottery. You can see everything, or you can drive around all day and not see anything. Well, we won the jackpot. We actually saw 2 dwarf mongooses. I scremed "they look like my ferrets!" haha (they did). Very cute. We also saw many bull elephants (the bulls are often alone, and most of these were). Absolutely perfect creatures. Breath taking. You can in no way compare these animals to any elephant you see in north america. These ones are magnificant.
Near the end of the day we spot some female elephants in the near bush so we pull over. They look like they want to cross the road to go down to the river so we and the few other vehicles beack up and let them through. Little did we know how many of them there were. They come out of the bush infront of us and behind us. There's at least 30 of them, bulls, females and babies!!! The moms with small babies would come into the road and turn and stare at you and flare ears out, kind of like saying "don't even think about it". It was unreal, They were only a few fewet away and sooooo many. Completely surrounded. Very overwhemlimg. I uploadewd the video, so definately check it out.
Other animals that we saw were Ostridge, a black momba, giraffs, warthogs, hippos, tortoses, crocks, storks, hyenna, velvet monkeys, impala, zebra, red hertabeast (extremely rare in the kruger area), baboons, water monitors and a bunch I can't think of and more that i dont kow the name of!
So seeing the lion pride in the early morning was really cool but we still hadn't see any male lions. It was the last hour in the park and we see some vehicles pulled over. There were 2 male lions laying in the grass. Really cool. They both had black in their manes. I uploaded a pictures, although only one of them is in it since only onew at this point had its head up.
Gecko Bushpackers was amazing. My wake up call (except for the day I got up at 4am) was velvet monkeys jumping on the roof to wake you up!! They actually pear over the edge of the hostel owners window to see if they are awake in the morning! My last night there we had visitors over night. I bunch of hippos caused some havoc. The ripped open some water pipes to play in the water haha. One of the owners, Edwin, had to get up at 2am to deal with this. Keep in mind this is about 10 feet from the hostel!!! ....hello africa!
The afternoon that I arrived I asked the owners, Edwin and Francias if there were any walking/hiking trails around. they said yes and told me where to go. On my way there I'm walking down the road beside a pond (this is a dirt road in a mountainous area, outside of a small "city" about 15 minutes away) when I hear rustling in the bush next to me. My first instinct is 'oh s***' because it sounds BIG. But that passes because I can tell it is obvioulsy scared of me and is high tailing it out of there. A few seconds later I heard a big "THUD" of whatever it was jumping into the pond. So I peak up over the bank to see what it is and there is a gigantic lizard head peeking out of the water. And I do mean gigantic. If you make fists with both hands and put them side by side it was bigger than this. I people about it back at the hostel later and I was informed that it was a water monitor and was "minimum 4 or 5 feet long". Pretty cool. Apparently these guys are quite shy.
To describe Gecko and the area perfectly, it was a slice of paradise. I could have stayed put right there for the rest of my life and have been perfectly content. I sat outside with a guy I met talking both nights and I stared at the same tree for hours because it is just an amazing tree!! Everything in that area is just something out of your imagination.
I'll end here as I have to get up at 4:45 am tomorrow to go out on the reserve with Phalalo in hopes of spotting the dassies (spelling?) that were released over the weekend. We'll just be sitting in the area that they were released from 5 until about 8 am.
Getting up early here I find is an easy thing to do. Who knows what the day will bring.
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