Our last morning game drive out Thakadu River Camp turned out to be predator morning. We were looking for lions, because everyone in the camp heard lions roaring about a mile to the north, at about 4:45. We didn’t see any lions that morning, but we saw a brown hyena, several jackals, and some African wild dogs. The latter are third on the list of African endangered species, behind the Black Rhino (we saw those yesterday), and the Ethiopian wolf. There was a small pack of four wild dogs, just snoozing in the shade of some low trees, their legs bloody and their tummies quite full from the morning’s successful hunt. According to Hayden, the wild dogs are very efficient predators, with a 90% success rate when they hunt. The bigs cats don’t even come close.
After that very exciting morning drive, we moved down the road to stay for two nights at Black Rhino Lodge, adjacent to the Pilanesberg National Park. What a gorgeous area!
The drive to Pilanesberg took just about 1-½ hours, lots of dirt roads and some roads under paving construction. We passed many villages along the way, well kept and new homes being built to replace the older ones. The folks that live there are belong to a tribe out of Botswana, but when the colonials drew the border between Botswana and South Africa, they didn’t take into account tribal territories.
We arrived just in time for lunch, had a quick snack then retreated to our rooms to shower and get ready for the next game drive that began at 4:30 - 9:00. This range is much different, it is an old volcano bed that is ringed by hills and mountain range. It is quite a bit greener than the last range, and the animals seem a bit healthier. (Medikwe has about 500% of their ideal elephant population, and the vegetation shows it. All the other preserves are already loaded with elephants, and culling for the health of the population is frowned upon by the tree huggers, so the park management is faced with a real dilemma with no easy solution.) First off we ran into two herds of elephants that were playing and drinking from a swampy area along side the road. We
then drove down the dirt road and encountered two more elephants, both bulls, one younger and one quite a bit older. The older one approached the front of our vehicle and shook his head and stamped his feet a bit. He was not pleased that we were blocking his way. The driver backed up a bit but the elephant continued to move directly at us. (Later, our guides told us that driving toward the elephant, however slowly, would have been perceived as a challenge, and would have ended very badly for us and our vehicle.) The brush was thick on both left and right, backing up at a speed to outpace the moving elephant wasn’t an option, so we just sat still and held our breath. At the last second, he swerved a little bit to his right and brushed by the left side of our vehicle. I think we were all frozen in space, except for Vinnie and Bradley who were trying to film him. (Vinnie: film didn’t work so good, I couldn’t get more than about three feet away from the elephant, so the film is just a moving gray wall.) He was so close all you could see was his rough skin. We spent the rest of the drive seeing all the animals except for Lions or any other cats. Tomorrow we plan on concentrating on them!
