My Thankgiving Safari Trip

So for Thanksgiving break last week I went on my safari trip to Kruger National Park. I've been planning this trip since the beginning of the school year and organized it for ten of us, which turned out to be a lot of work. So I was very happy to finally be heading out and luckily everything worked out great. We flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg and stayed the night in this really cool backpacker lodge on Tuesday night on the 25th. The next day we were picked up at about 6:30 in the morning. It was a long all day drive out to the lodge we were staying in that night. But along the way we got to see the awesome landscape of mountains and canyons along the way. One interesting thing was the miles and miles of logging forests they have outside of Johannesburg. They went on for over an hour while we were driving, big groups of long straight pine trees in rows. They were in all stages of growth and some were just fields of stumps that had been clear cut and then burned out. It seemed like a rough way of doing it, but with how many trees were out there, it must be effective around here. They re-plant once they clear cut, so it seems all right to me.

We also stopped along the way at God's Window and the Blyde River Canyon which was really amazing. The canyon is the third largest in the world and is 33 km long and We stopped at a few places to look out at it and it was one of the coolest places I have been. Sadly it was kinda cloudy that day so I didn't get the best views I could have. I put up a lot of pictures of it on the site, along with the rest of the trip.

After that we went on to the lodge outside the camp. We slept for the whole thing in big green tents on platforms with mattresses. Pretty fancy camping in my experience. They sure felt great after the long days we had though. At the first lodge, we got a great African dinner that we ate outside and also had some local children do some tribal dancing for us. It was a very cool night.

The next morning we got up very early and drove straight out into the park. The game drives were lots and lots of driving around on dirt and paved roads looking at mostly the same terrain. That part of it would get a little boring at times. A lot of the time was spent looking and waiting for a sighting. But it was all worth it when I did see things. I saw so many animals I've never seen before, even in zoos. And a lot I've only seen in zoos. As soon as we got in I saw a hyena on the side of the road. It was a lot broader and stronger looking than I expected. I would not want to mess with one of those. The most common things were impalas and zebras and wildebeest and other impala like animals. I must have seen hundreds of those over the three days. I also saw giraffes and elephants. Those were my favorite. They were so big and calm and just seemed not to care at all about anything else. I loved seeing the elephant. I saw a little baby one too, that was really cool. The best elephant sighting was when we saw some on both sides of the road and one walked right to our truck and then around behind it to cross the road. I've never been so close and this elephant was bigger than our truck!

The big five in Africa are the African Elephant, the White Rhino, the lion, the leopard, and the Water Buffalo. These are the five more dangerous land animals in Africa. I managed to see all but one of them. The lion I saw on the first day in the afternoon. We saw a big male sitting under a tree in the shade. There was another male under a tree near him and a female and another male behind the first one. There was also some sort of impala like animal lying dead beside them that they had caught. They were about 200 yards away, but I saw it through the binoculars. I figured out how to take pictures through the binoculars too. That was really useful too, because I saw the rhinos, two underneath a tree the next day and I managed to get some good pictures through them even though they were a couple hundred yards away. The rhinos were a lot bigger than I expected. The only big one we missed was the leopard. Didn't see a cheetah either actually, but its not a big five.

The trip was an amazing experience. I have been looking forward to this trip for months and it was everything I had hoped. I was very happy that all of my planning worked out great and I got a chance to see so many new things. The animals were incredible, the canyon was really awesome and it was a very nice break from the work I've been doing lately. I feel ready now to focus in and get all the work done we need to in the next few weeks for the project. We have a lot of writing to do now and have to bring all we've done together into our atlas, which should be interesting. We are planning to take all six groups work and put it into one large publication, which can hopefully be used for future planning and to help the park get foreign investors to contribute to the efforts. It should be interesting. Wish me luck!