It’s a particular skill, spotting wildlife. You all load into a ‘combee’–a minivan (all 9 of you, even though there are only 8 seats)–at 6:00 AM, right when the gates of the camp open. The African sun, like a glowing Mandarin orange, is hastily rising over the vfeld, or bush.
You drive out of the camp and pick a direction, heading down a ‘tar’ (paved) or dirt road. At 6:00 AM, there is a mass diaspora from the camp, with minivans and SUVs heading off in all directions. Although a lot of people leave the camp then, you quickly lose sight of most or all of the other cars. In a park the size of Wales, there’s plenty of road for everyone.
You start looking as soon as you pass through the gates, cruising along at 40 or 50 km/hour. The terrain varies, but generally it’s knee-high grass dotted with short trees and bushes. You apply the same technique that your driving instructor taught you–look into the middle distance, and everything closer to you will still be in your field of view.
None of the animals are easy to spot. You’ll generally see impala, because they’re so prevalent–there are 150,000 in Kruger alone. And wildebeest and zebra almost always travel in herds. Even massive animals, like elephants and giraffes, however, are difficult to separate from the landscape. If it’s not close to the road, elephants mostly look like big thorn bushes, and a giraffe may be concealed behind a tree.
Other, rarer animals are even more tricky. Other antelopes–kudus, duikkers, elands–are rare, and their coats provide them with excellent camaflouge among the trees. Hippos and crocodiles spend much of the day in the water, and they’ll often look like logs or submerged rocks.
The trickiest of all are the big cats–lions, cheetahs and leopards. You’ve only seen two lions, and you had a tip from an excited Afrikaans driver passing in the other direction along a dirt road. Crawling along, you spot the lions’ spore or dung in the road (you’ve become something of an animal shit expert). Your entire car stares out of the right-hand side of combee, scanning the vegetation. You’ve learned from your more-experienced combee-mates (in particular, a 79-year-old woman with eyes like a fish eagle), that, as the day heats up, cats will seek the shade of bushes and trees.
Finally, you spot them, two young males lounging in the shade of a thorn bush. Like most of the animals in the park, they couldn’t care less about you. They scan the horizon briefly, lick their lips, scratch behind an ear, and just hang out. You watch them for 15 minutes, awed at their beauty but slightly miffed at their inactivity. Eventually, one of the lions puts his head down, signifying that the chance of much action is nil. You move on, craning your neck for the next sighting.
Many visitors come on safari interested only in ‘The Big Five’. These are the five animals (selected, no doubt, by some 19th century marketing team), that can kill a man with ease. They are the elephant, the buffalo, the rhino, the leopard and the lion. You’ve only seen three of the big five, but that’s not really the point, is it? You’ve seen dozens of other animals–some of them very rare–and spend several days in a landscape like no other. Ultimately, safaris are as much about the getting there as the actual spotting.
DarrenBarefoot.com 