[Worldtrippers home] [Crystal home]
We set off on our afternoon game drive at 4:30 pm as usual. Our guide Nevermind announced that today’s priorities would be elephants and lions.
But first there was a detour. All the guides in Kapama Game Reserve have two-way radios in their trucks. If a guide sees something interesting, s/he notifies everyone else. Apparently Nevermind heard something on his radio, because he suddenly changed direction and shifted gears. Normally he drives about 20-25 kph. He was suddenly speeding 40 kph on the unpaved dirt roads.
One of the other trucks had spotted one of the rarest animals in the world: a pangolin. The pangolin looks like a cross between an armadillo and an anteater. Due to superstitions about its meat and scales, it is considered the most trafficked mammal in the world. Guides are lucky to spot one every one to five years. Every truck in the park converged on the spot.
The original truck saw the pangolin cross the road. By the time we reached it, the pangolin had panicked and burrowed itself into the ground in the bushes. All we got to see was a mound of scales. But we saw a wild pangolin!
When people talk about an African safari, they often talk about the “Big Five.” The lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and buffalo are so-named because they were prized by hunters. Today, visitors are happy just to spot and photograph them. So far we have seen rhino and buffalo. This afternoon, we were able to find the other three.
We came upon a herd of elephants from a nearby sanctuary. They cannot be released back into the wild, so their caretakers take them out for a walk every day. Technically they were not wild elephants, but they were elephants and we saw them.
Nevermind and Timba have been trying for two days to track a leopard. Today they were successful. We came upon an 18-month-old female. She had been taught to hunt and was now completely independent of her mother. She didn’t mind at all that we followed her around in our truck, or that we parked mere feet away from her.
As dusk fell, we set of in search of a lion. Again, we were given directions by another guide in another truck. A 13-year-old male was sleeping in the road. (Males live about 15 years, so this one would be considered a senior lion.) He also seemed completely undisturbed by the multitude of trucks that parked right next to him.
After two days, we have successfully spotted our “Big Five.” We have several game drives still to come… anything else we spot is just a bonus on this terrific adventure.
