Friday, August 18, 2006

 

In Search Of The Big Five

Well, the big trip is nearly at an end, but we wanted to make sure that we ended it in style so we saved the Kruger National Park until the end of our time in South Africa. We decided to visit the main 'public' area of the park rather than the far more expensive private reserves, so we were a little bit worried that we might not see as much as we headed off into the park at 6am on the first day.

There are of course many different animals in the park but most people are here to see the 'Big Five'. There's not really an official league table but we decided that the animal kingdom here is definitely divided, at least in the eyes of the tourists. At the top of the list you have the Big Five, these are your Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United, the Premier League of the park, so named because they were ones considered by the old hunters to be the most challenging. The rest of the animals can be considered to be merely 'League One', and some of them are very clearly 'Vauxhall Conference', with apologies to all the non-football fans out there (which will of course be soccer to some of you!).

Anyhow, it is apparently quite tricky to spot all of the Big Five, and to do so in a single visit to the park would be quite an achievement. So armed with our list of the 5 at 6am on our first day we let battle commence. We were through the park gates by 7am (you see it isn't all lay-ins this travelling lark!) and by 9am we had done 80% of the list, not bad going, at this rate we could pack up early and save ourselves a few quid! Something made us look at the list again and we realised that we had in fact only seen 20% of the list, the Elephant. Somehow, Giraffe doesn't make it into the Premiership (come on, how difficult would it have been to shoot one?!), and neither do the Zebra or the Hippo, clearly BIG doesn't necessarily mean LARGE in this game.......

So having properly reviewed the list and established that we were in fact looking for Elephant, Rhino, Buffalo, Lion and Leopard we carried on into the park. Any doubts that we would drive for hours and see nothing were very quickly quashed as by about 11am we had clocked up a list of around 10 different animals that we had seen, still only the one in the Big Five though but based on what we had heard from other people, we were pretty convinced that we would at least get 60% of the list ticked off on this trip.

There are just a few rules that you have to obey in the park. First of all, the speed limit is less than 40mph and you are restricted to only 25mph on the dirt roads, although you often need to be travelling even more slowly than that if you want to see much. Then there's the rather important 'staying alive' rule, so you aren't allowed to get out of the car, in fact "no part of your body or camera may protrude from the vehicle". (There are a few picnic areas but these are well fenced off from the wildlife!).


You also need to pay close attention to the park closing times. The main gates to the park close overnight and the 'campgrounds' where the accommodation is are also locked overnight. So by 6pm you either need to be out of the park or safely inside a campground, now this might seem straightforward but when you're driving 150 miles in a day at an average of only 15mph then you do need to pay close attention to the time!!

By the end of the first day we were getting pretty good at the animal spotting, although it really is amazing how SLOWLY you cover the distances when you stop every kilometer or so to watch some zebra or giraffe just grazing at the side of the road. We had also been warned that we would see loads of "Rock Rhino". It took us a while to figure out what this meant, but we eventually saw plenty of them, along with a whole load of "Log Lions", "Boulder Buffalo", and of course "Tree-Raffes". Yup, once you start looking closely, EVERYTHING looks like it could be an animal hiding in the grass!! Despite all these false alarms though we had still spotted some real buffalo and a solitary rhino, so we were back up to a genuine 60% of the Big Five by the time we arrived safely at camp.

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