Bushwalk, tale of the dung! March 16th

Bushwalk is a really cool thing where you go with a ranger with a big gun. They take you on a tour to see some animals, and hopefully track down something interesting… and if you’re really lucky you’ll see a lion, cheetah or a leopard.

The first thing we learnt was the difference between the dung of a white rhino and the black rhino. Animalwise it’s got nothing to do with colour. White rhino can get up to 3 tons and the mule is wide, whilst a grown black rhino is somewhere between 800kg to 1,2 tons and the mule is more pointed. Big difference in size and weight in other words. Dungwise… the white rhinos dung looks pretty much like horse dung… with lots of fibre… just bigger loads. The black rhinos kak (Afrikaans for shit) is more reddish in colour with small wooden pieces cut in a 45 degree angle. Very useful to know. The black rhino is a lot more aggressive than the white one. They are both territorial and can coexist in the same territory. They don’t fight with each other, only with other rhinos of the same sort. Apparently they don’t interbreed either, so you won’t get a grey rhino!

Then we saw the hyena’s faeces… which is white with loads of calcium after all the bones it consumes. The cape buffalo makes dung like the cows at home in Norway. It’s black on the outside… and green and mushy on the inside if it’s fresh. On and on we went… all sorts of small and bigger pellets from antelopes, Kudu, Giraffe and more…

It was pretty much a big tale of the dung! Oh… we did actually see an animal as well. It was actually quite cool, I’ll give them that. We saw an elephant, and it came quite close… maybe 15metres away from us before it turned. So we did see something. The dung by the way also resembles that of the white rhino, just bigger heaps.

Another funny thing that you learn from own experience when you enter Kruger is that the speed limit is 40 or 50km an hour. Hardly anybody exceeds that limit. Not because they are afraid of knocking something, but because it’s uncomfortable. There are speed bumps all over the place… not tarred ones that you are used to, but loads of elephant and rhino dung.

All in all we had a great bushwalk. Although we saw more dung than animals, it was not a kak trip. It’s exciting, and I can recommend it! Just, if safari in a vehicle is hot, then this is beyond purgatory!!

Safari, Hluhluwe and Umfolozi, March 8-9th

Coming back from Mozambique we found accommodation as close to the park as possible. That way we could be at the gate when they opened up at six o’clock in the morning. The first day we saw some giraffes and some rhinos and lots of Impalas. We drove past a place where lions had been spotted, but the grass was just too bloody high for us to see anything. It was generally a good game-drive, and we got a feeling for some good spots in the park, but yet we didn’t have a really close encounter with any of the big guys. Until, right at the end when we were speeding like crazy to get to the gate, knowing that we were already too late. Then, suddenly two big rhinos decided to block the road very effectively. The female looked really nervous and agitated, running back and forth and throwing the head… and the horn around. I got the picture in my head of a matador pierced by the bull in the arenas in Spain… then we backed the car, thinking that we were the reason for this behaviour. Suddenly as we were sitting there looking and waiting for an opening I was aware of something in the side of my vision. A hyena was standing next to the car, only two metres away from me. It was looking at me, then the rhinos… walked a bit and all the time checking out the situation. Obviously this was the culprit, causing the distress. Just by the look of it I could feel the hair in the back of my neck was rising and we wound up the window… just enough so that the jaws of the beast couldn’t fit through the opening. With the powerful body and the dark big eyes it looked like pure evil… Even though it was a fraction of the size of the rhinos… I had no problem understanding the rhinos. Eventually we got out, and we had spent the entire day only in the Hluhluwe part. We had already decided we needed another day to cover Umfolozi as well.

The next morning we decided to just check out some of our favourite and most promising spots in Hluhluwe before we were gonna shoot down to Umfolozi. It turned out that we saw a hell of a lot of elephants, rhinos and water-buffalos in one place that we got so hooked up that we were still there at lunchtime… and far away from Umfolozi.

As we were driving towards the southern part of Hluhluwe the vegetation got less lush and more dry and open. We found it easier to spot the antelopes and the buck… hundreds all over the place… but we had the feeling that the really big guys preferred the thick bush where they could hide away. Further along, that theory had to be dumped when we saw herds of giraffes, rhinos and buffalos. Again we got hooked up and had to prioritize the really big ones only… in order to make it out before closing time. Still there was plenty of areas we did not cover in Umfolozi, and we could easily have spent one or two extra days there.

All in all, we saw masses of animals… but still not that feeling from other smaller parks that the park was so small that the animals were pretty much lined up for you. This was proper wilderness… and I’m sure for Oyvind it was a bit different from Elk-safari in Løten at home in Norway.