In the beginning of October, I was invited to join J in her office’s retreat – which took place at a Safari Resort in South Africa’s Limpopo province. The venue and event were pretty great, but most memorable were the two safaris that we attended – on Saturday morning we joined a bush walk, and on Sunday morning we did a guided car safari.
For the bush walk, we were taken by a ranger with a car out into the wildlife reserve and then started walking. Especially in comparison to our self-drive safari in Namibia, it was great to have the guide’s explanation of all the animal tracks as well as all the smaller animals and plants. We also got to see our first Rhinos on this walk – a mother and a baby who were eating in some bushes. We got pretty close – as close as you would dare on foot – but they were still quite hidden in the bushes.
The game drive on Sunday was even better. It started out relatively uneventful since we were driving around for a long time without seeing any big game. After a while, however, we came across a big group of around six Rhinos that were grazing on an open field somewhere. Here we had a very good view of Rhinos for the first time – they are really incredible and fascinating animals. It is a shame that they are under such danger through poaching. After a while we moved on and managed to track down three lionesses that were hanging out in a foresty patch. The ranger explained that they had only recently been introduced to the park and still hadn’t seen very much of it or of the other animals. We watched them for a while until they started to get moving. The ranger tried to follow them, as good as the roads and tracks allowed – obviously the lions weren’t exactly following them. Over time, we realized that the lionesses were moving closer and closer to where we had earlier seen the Rhinos, and sure enough, eventually the lions got to where the rhinos were grazing and decided to check them out (they are just big cats after all and just as curious). Now the lions probably can’t do much harm to the thick-skinned, heavy rhinos, but the rhinos must have gotten a little confused by those lions circling around them – especially after one of the lions decided to charge a herd of warthogs that were sitting on the other side of the rhinos (the warthogs escaped unharmed, seems the lioness wasn’t hungry and was just playing). Anyway, the rhinos got pretty agitated through all this, and one of the biggest rhinos started attacking another one – first it lifted the other one half up in the air with its horn, then it started chasing the other one around – you wouldn’t think that those massive animals can run so fast! Even our ranger thought that this was a most unusual sight! We continued watching this for some more time until the lions finally had enough and moved on, but we had definitely captured some exciting photos.
I will post the pictures later – they are definitely worth looking at!