After a looooooong day of travel--Zürich to Munich to Cape Town to the miraculous, gorgeous little Skukuza airport--we arrived at my new favorite place on earth, Lion Sands Narina Lodge, in Kruger National Park, where one goes to see the aminals. My husband knows very well that I'm not a roughin'-it type of gal, and he chose wisely: Lion Sands is beautiful and plush and comfortable and all-inclusive and has tremendously good food and is located right next to a river that is constantly inundated with wildlife. So as we sat down to lunch, we were greeted by no fewer than thirty elephants strolling down the river. (And then warned to watch out for the monkeys, who are very accomplished thieves.)
Elephants with babies!!!
So. many. elephants. Very first thing.
Oh yeah, and this guy was wandering around at the water's edge, too.
Waterbuck on the island. (These guys were always there, regardless of the time of day, and there were always female nyalas and bushbucks lounging around in the grass around the cabins.)
The monkey warning turned out to be quite timely: this guy stole our bread, right off the table, and was lightning-fast about it.
Dining terrace at the lodge. The entire left side of the building here is open to the elements and faces the river...
...thusly. So dramatic, so gorgeous.
And then we saw our room. Holy smokes, this place was nearly as big as our apartment. So pretty! So full of snacks and drinks and hand-written notes from the staff, every day! (Not shown here: the absolutely massive bathroom with huge tiled shower, stand-alone bathtub, and its own exits both to the deck and to the outdoor shower. Sheesh.)
The plunge pool on our deck, overlooking the river. Always some sort of wildlife back there!
Elevated walkway between the lodge and cabins. This thing might keep you safe from an impala attack (...is that a thing?), but if an elephant got a bee in his or her bonnet, you'd be toast. (We weren't allowed to walk back to our cabins at night by ourselves. And with apparent good reason: in the very recent past, someone had returned to our cabin to find a leopard lounging on the front porch. I'm sure there are plenty of other exciting stories, too, to justify such a policy.)
As I was inspecting our outdoor area (because we also had an outdoor shower with a full view of the river, as one does), I noticed this guy and his friend eating at the trees across the river...
...and this little troop of baboons traipsing past. (There are at least 4 here.)
And then this stunning male nyala wandered past, maybe 10 feet away...and all of this was before we even got in the Jeep for our first game drive (as they call riding-around-looking-for-animals there--took me a minute to figure out what they were talking about).
At Lion Sands, you definitely stick to a schedule, and it's mostly full of food: pre-breakfast and drinks at 5:00, depart for first game drive at 5:30, breakfast upon your return, lunch between 12:00 and 14:00, more drinks and snacks ("tea time") at 16:00, depart for second game drive at 16:30, dinner after 20:00, rinse and repeat--and so after we inspected our room and settled in, we headed back to the main lodge to meet up with our hilarious and super-knowledgeable guide and driver, Willie, and a positively delightful couple from the US, Wally and Sandy. And then we left and immediately started spotting things.
(Fair warning: I'm usually really bad about including too many photos in these posts, but friends, today, it will be extra. Plus, this is just as much a record for me as it is for you, so here we go.)
Willie pointed out this beautiful starling, which looks black from most angles, but then it moves and all of a sudden it's iridescent blue.
Tree full of at least 4 starlings and two yellow-billed hornbills doing their mating dance.
Giraffe!
A weeny woony steenbok--and this is as big as they get! (Like, only slightly larger than my fat cat Stewie. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.)
Male kudu. Willie told us that you can judge the age of these things by the number of turns in their horns; each turn is about 2.5 years. (Kudu, unlike steenbok, are quite large--maybe elk-sized, I'd say.)
Elephant in the brush! This guy was munching around and knocking over small trees to get at the roots and to make reaching the leaves a little easier. It was crazy-impressive to watch him just kinda shoulder into this tree, and boom, down it goes.
Male impala. I swear to you, there must be as many impala out there as rabbits, or mice, or whatever little animal breeds out there like rabbits. Impala were everywhere.
Hello, ladies. (Lady impalas, that is. I think they have such pretty faces.)
Family of giraffes! That little one in the middle was just about to start nursing here!
And then Willie got a call on his radio, and started tearing down the dirt track in the opposite direction in which we'd been heading, and came to a slow and quiet stop very near this guy: a white rhino. He was actually quite mellow, and just sorta wandered around watching us watch him. (I thought it was very cool how the guides all shared info with each other; when one spotted something rare or amazing, they'd put out the word so that other guides could come find it too.) This guy stuck around until an arriving Jeep came in a little too fast, and then he was gone.
Willie, our guide/driver (with the mustache for Movember), and Lukas, our tracker*, with the apero they'd set up near the end of each afternoon game drive. (Yes, that's feeding time number six per day, and apparently we were whipping around in the bush with a full bar and snacks in the back of the Jeep every night. It was awesome.)
Waaaaaay across the river, next to which we'd stopped for snackie time, was this leopard, taunting us with just how far away he was, and how poor the light was at this particular time of day. (We'd been told we'd be lucky to see a leopard; apparently they're something of a rarity, and so we were happy just to have this glimpse.)
But at least we got the sunset. Holy cow.
Back at the lodge, we found that the drapes around our massive bed untied to produce built-in mosquito nets--clever!--and that our lovely dinner table on the terrace came with a daily-changing menu featuring at least 2 appetizer options, 4 mains, and 2 desserts. Safari camping, this was not--and I adored every second of it. (Plus: the food was crazy good. And also, while we were eating, a hyena sorta half-heartedly chased a couple of impala past the terrace, then flopped down in the grass for a while as we ate. Unreal.)
After a snack and coffee the next morning around 5:00**, we hopped back in our Jeep with Lukas, Willie, Sandy, and Wally, and found that two friendly Swiss-French gentlemen--Thomas and Loïc, with whom we'd chatted extensively the previous evening--were also in our car. And off we all went, for game drive no. 2. First sighting: a handful of monkeys clambering around some fallen trees, and this sweet momma sitting with her baby. (Awwwwwwww.)
Around the very next corner, we found a handful of the laziest hyenas ever. (Apparently, they'd killed some sort of grazing animal and gorged themselves to sleep. They were literally unmoved by our presence.) Hadn't really ever had feelings on hyenas before we saw these guys, but their splayed-outedness made me laugh hysterically and I loved them.
Next, another group had spotted the area's dominant male leopard by the river, and so we sat and watched him loaf around for a bit. (He, too, apparently also had a kill, but had stashed his in a nearby tree. He was quite a ways away from us, and didn't do much other than walk about a bit and groom a little, but he was still just spectacular.)
After the leopard went back to his tree, we managed to tear ourselves away and came across a couple of waterbucks up-close, including this baby one. He was so fuzzy.
Back past the hyenas: yup, still sleeping.
They're actually kinda cute, in a what-a-weird-animal sorta way. (Interesting fact: hyenas are neither cats nor dogs--although they have similarities to both--and instead have their own little family, Hyaenidae. It's only got four members, and one of them is an insectivore! Amazing.)
Young male kudu. I couldn't get enough kudus.
I have no idea how he spotted it, but Loïc pointed out this very quiet rhino--almost impossibly, a black rhino. Very endangered, very rare, and an unbelievable, if slightly unsettling, experience to see one just wandering around in the wild. (These are smaller, more skittish, and more aggressive than the white rhinos, and this guy was watching us very, very closely. He only stuck around for a minute, snorting and pawing and pacing just a bit, then ran off into the scrub. The next morning, the guides showed us a Jeep that'd been rammed by a black rhino a few months before. You could see where the horn had poked through the back bumper and gouged the rear door. Srsly yikes.)
A little red-billed hornbill, sitting still enough that we could actually get decent photos of him! (Kruger is rife with hornbills, and we saw all three types--red-, yellow-, and gray-billed. Neat.)
A male yellow-billed hornbill doing his squawky, swoopy mating dance. (There were no females in sight; we were informed that they watch and judge from a distance.)
And then...lions. Our one, single lion experience, but it was pretty impressive. (Apologies, though: I was too busy gaping to take decent photos during all of this.) These, too, were a ways off from us, but mesmerizing nonetheless. These two youngish ones appeared to be basking innocently in the sun, and then the one on the right meandered off, we presumed to get a drink from the river between us and their sunny hillside.
Then, however, another young female lion came running into view, chased by this cape buffalo...and I think we all realized at the same time that these lions were going to try to take this thing down. The female lion he was chasing had lured him into a Jurassic Park-style ambush, as the lion who'd wandered off earlier came in behind the buffalo...
...and just that quickly, the buffalo was down and the lions--somehow, there were suddenly five of them there--were on him. (You can just see the bum and tail of a pouncing lion in the center here. Sadly, there was a small hill and some stupid, stupid trees between us and all the action, so once the initial attack was over, all we could do was listen and watch to see if the buffalo tried to get back up and put up a fight.) Because the takedown was lightning-fast, Willie and Lukas speculated that the buffalo had been sick or injured, but let me tell you, that poor thing bellowed on and off for the next 50 minutes as we all sat around and waited to see if anything else dramatic would happen.
It didn't. The lions were 100% victorious that day, and it was both horrifying (poor buffalo!) and exhilarating (one does always like to know that a big carnivore got a good meal...) to see Nature do her thing, right in front of us. (Also: as we were observing all of this, a handful of hyenas slunk up behind us on their way to check out the kill, but as soon as they realized that we were between them and their target, they were out in a cloud of dust and a crackling of bushes. Wild.)
After we left the lions, we spotted this fat, fat hippo sleeping away...
...and these pretty ibises by the river...
...and then Willie got another leopard call, and off we went, and found his favorite female sleeping in this tree, right above our heads. (Hee...monorail leopard...)
She, too, was utterly unconcerned with our presence. So for a good long time, we sat and watched this amazing cat sleep and stir and reposition and yawn and then go back to sleep. Magnificent.
Honestly, even this close, I still don't think I would have noticed this thing just hanging out in this tree. Those trackers have some talent.
And that was just the second of our five game drives, friends. After all that excitement, we returned to the lodge for breakfast...
...and the elephants were back.
This momma and at least one of her kids were poking around the trees right beneath our deck.
These two, meanwhile, were getting a good drink from the river.
Came back inside from watching the elephants out back and heard a crash come from the front. Popped out the front door and watched these two eat the trees out there! We were surrounded, and it was amazing.
Sitting at lunch on the terrace, we got to see the smallest of the babies running about with his funny wobbly gait and his as-yet-uncontrolled trunk wiggling all over. He was sooooo ridiculously cute! And that mid-sized elephant in the background here had been chasing off some of the nyalas grazing nearby, for no apparent reason other than that he was obviously enjoying himself! It was hilarious. (I have roughly a jillion photos of these elephants, in case you hadn't worked that out yet. They were mesmerizing and entertaining and I could have watched just them, all day, if they hadn't always had somewhere else to be.)
Also caught this giraffe very awkwardly getting a drink from the river.
Game drive 3 started with a trip over to a lion kill that had happened that morning as we were watching our own--another Jeep had happened across the scene right after the kill, and there were some graphic photos from 10-ish feet away from these lions chowing down on a bushbuck!--but by the time we got there that afternoon, the lions had dragged their prize down into a hollow surrounded by trees. So we could hear them, but not see them...although we did see a fair number of vultures lurking in the trees, waiting for the aftermath.
Next, we were about to go looking for a family of hippos--with us on foot, mind you--when we were told, very quietly, to get back into the Jeep: Lukas had spotted a leopard very close by. (The animals in this part of Kruger are, for the most part, very accustomed to the Jeeps, and so one of the rules during the game drives is that you have to keep your seat; if you stand, and the animals see human outlines, that's when they panic and/or run.)
Absolutely no sooner than we'd done that, the same leopard from the tree that morning came strolling very casually past our car, almost within touching distance, and we followed her for a bit as she meandered off into the scrub.
Stunning.
On our way towards the nightly snackie stop, we passed the hyenas again. Still sleeping.
After it got dark, Lukas spotted a massive male leopard lounging about in the grass...***
...and then we turned in a different direction from our lodge, and ended up at this gorgeous, candle-lit dinner in the bush! There was an obscene amount of food here, and, naturally, we felt it our duty to at least sample a tiny bit of everything. (For me, the stand-out was the oxtail, and dessert was a really excellent birthday cake; I think there were three of us in the whole Lion Sands group that were there for birthdays.)
Our delightful Jeep companions at dinner: Wally and Sandy in the front; yours truly and Mike in the middle; Thomas and Loïc further back; and Willie at the far end.****
The next morning, we crossed the river to go east instead of west. (The river itself and all of the wetlands along the it were gorgeous.)
My first warthog!
Defunct railway bridge from the Selati Railway, originally intended to connect inland gold mines to the coast of Mozambique. Trains ran from 1912 until 1972--from the 1920s through 70s as tourist/safari trains!--and then the tracks were removed. What remains are a couple of bridges, some embankments, and a drainage tunnel or two.
Another woony little steenbok, this one not running away.
And then, baboons. Soooo many baboons.
Lots of babies, too, either riding underneath...
...or on top of Mom.
Duiker--another very, very small grazer--as spotted on our single, very uneventful, bush walk. (I think we saw two of these, total, and they were always moving/running away. Quite happy that I managed to get this shot at all.)
Big ol' marabou stork. These things can be 5 feet/1.5 meters tall and have a wingspan of up to 8.5 feet/2.6 meters.
Oh, hello.
Back at the ranch, our extremely nice waitress, Patience, pointed out a crocodile in the river. Yes, he was far away, and no, he didn't do much but sit by the island for a good while and then swim over towards the riverbank, but it was exciting nonetheless, because crocodile.
Wee green bird hopping about outside the lodge.
Neat blue-headed lizard that Mike spotted!
Terrible photo--I had my camera on the absolute wrong setting for this lighting--but this tiny baby monkey and I had a very brief moment before he dashed up this tree and out of sight. So, so small!
Saddle-billed stork poking around near our deck.
'Round about tea time on this day, a handful of cape buffalo showed up near the terrace. Or so I was told. We arrived just in time for them to disappear almost entirely into the tall grass. Yeah, sure, there's buffalo there. Riiiight.
While game drive no. 4 had been rather anticlimactic, no. 5 was a just a great way to spend our final night at Lion Sands. Lukas and Willie found us yet another leopard!
Also sleepy.
I love how they nap draped over the branch.
View from the back row of the Jeep. That's where Lukas sat on every game drive--the front of the Jeep, and I have no idea how he stayed on his seat during some of our wilder off-roading jaunts.
Couple more big male kudus.
Those horns!
Such neat animals.
Big ol' hippo sleeping in the river.
Flock of guinea fowl chasing each other about.
This one wasn't having any of it and went up a tree.
Sandy spotted this huge Bateleur eagle way off in the distance...
...but this big male giraffe was much easier to pick out, for those of us with zero spotting skills. This guy was keeping a good eye on us, but was in no hurry to run away, unlike most of the giraffes we'd seen up close-ish.
On the other side of the road, a smaller female was nibbling delicately at a little tree next to our Jeep. She didn't run, either.
Amazing.
Another magnificent sunset, and on this particular evening, a fancy apero, where rounded a corner and found Tebogo (one of the lodge managers, who was everywhere, all the time) waiting for us with an actual bartender and an even fuller bar, already setup, complete with white tablecloth, all sorts of glassware, and a selection of delicious dips and snacks. This place, I think, might be my new favorite place on earth: incredible animals everywhere, great food available at all times, really nice and incredibly knowledgeable people, and apero hour every single day. Sighhhhhhhhh.
On the way back to the lodge, spotted our single and only zebra. At night. Trotting away from us. Bah, humbug. (And here I'd been led to believe by literally everyone who's ever been to Africa that the zebra everywhere are as numerous as the stars above. Lies. All lies.)
Another reason they won't let you walk to your room alone at night, I suppose: this here hippo was maybe 3 meters away from the walkway between the lodge and our cabin, although he seemed generally unperturbed at our presence.
After our final game drive together, Willie stuck around for an hour or so and we all hung out in the bar at the lodge, drinking and snacking and chatting about all manner of things (e.g., guides chasing elephants around the local golf course on their days off)...and then we found out that we'd get to have dinner in the lodge's wine room! Such a lovely, marvelous way to spend our final night with our new, wonderful friends in this absolutely incredible place. (Yes, I realize that is a lot of superlatives, but everything was superlative. And yes, I was wearing a jacket purchased in the on-site gift shop: it was COLD on those game drives first in the morning and after the sun set!)
Just your typical dinner menu at Lion Sands.
That evening, we all said our fond goodbyes and promised to keep in touch, and the next morning, Mike and I set off on the two-hour drive to the airport in Nelspruit, and just as we were leaving the park:
This pack of African wild dogs--quite rare and endangered--just showed up on the side of the road! An unbelievable farewell from an absolutely spectacular national park, I'd say.
After coffee in the airport bar...
...we headed off to our next destination: Victoria Falls. Stay tuned.
*Lukas, as it turns out, is a Master Tracker. One of only a handful in the world--and who knew??? Not us, that's for sure, until I looked up the lodge for a little more info last week. What a privilege.
**If you know anything about me, you know that 5:00 is still yesterday to me. I do not do mornings gracefully, easily, or pleasantly...but I found in Kruger that the insanely-early wake-up call was 100% worth it. And now that's the only item on my "Things Worth Getting Up Wicked Early For" list. (Said list used to also contain "international flights" and "climbing mountains," but the former generally doesn't require an early hour anymore, and for the latter, I'm far too decrepit nowadays. Sigh. Safari it'll have to be.)
***Willie said the lodge has gone to using red lights to scan for wildlife after dark because it doesn't dilate the animals' pupils, and I don't know anything about anything about that, but I can say that it makes for a surreal experience. And also, that's why most of the nighttime shots are red.
****Ok, so, I hate being hokey and sentimental, but in the interest of full disclosure: I got very, very attached to these people. For lack of a real way to explain it, I think something about being in that environment, seeing those extraordinary animals free and where they're supposed to be and up close, and putting ourselves slightly at risk in doing so, left me (on some level) a bit more open and vulnerable than usual, and sharing those experiences with such a small, wonderful group, very intensely, for several hours a day over several days, brought those good people right into my heart. (Plus, it didn't hurt that they were all kind and genuine and fun and funny and interesting and laid-back: what a group! What extraordinary luck for us!!) It was so sad to say goodbye to all of them, and I desperately hope that all of our paths will cross again.
WOW! I mean, WOW! That’s as articulate as I can get about your photos and your grand adventures! What an intense, wonderful trip! Thank you so much for sharing, Sarah. Looking forward to seeing you at Christmas!
ReplyDeleteCan i marry you and Mike and go on all your adventures with you. Comes with a bonus 3rd birthday every year!
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