My First Game Drive

We left the camp in three vehicles with our guides driving and our tracker sitting in the front.  It's up to these two guys to find the animals and interpret the behavior.  We had hardly gone 300 yds when our path was blocked by this small herd of Impalas.  They are a lot like our white-tailed deer in their abundance and demeanor.  Each little group has a dominant male.  Other adult males hang out in a bachelor group until the dominant male has lost his condition from breeding or fighting the other males, and then a newcomer might take over.  We would see many of these animals in the next few days.  Our guide, Andrew, was careful to explain details like markings, breeding habits, herd behavior and food.

We had hardly gone around the bend before we came across this group of warthogs grazing on the soccer field.  They are ugly and cute at the same time, and our propensity to see game so quickly seemed a good omen.

Our next chance to see an animal came when we got a report on the radio of a hippo at one of the reservoirs.  The guides do a great job of communicating over the radio when they have a good find.  There also seems to be a little competition among the guides to have the best finds.  Hippos spend most of their time in water and most of that underwater.  They don't swim, but walk along the bottoms.  We did get some big yawns to see how huge their jaws are.

It's hard to see in this photo, but Andrew is pointing out a spider web.  This particular web has a strand so strong that it has been used to  make bullet proof vests.  When he doubled the strand over about 5 thicknesses, it was almost impossible to break.  For those of us who have walked through spider webs in the woods, we came to appreciate the differences--these spiders can give some nasty bites, and the trackers sitting on the front of the vehicle hate it when a driver runs them into one.

Not far away, we encountered our first elephant.  This one is well know to the guides and has the affectionate name of "floppy ear".  He's an older solitary bull elephant.  We followed him a bit until he seemed to be a little annoyed.

We found a vista for a "sundowner" where we stopped to watch the sunset and have drinks.

This is also the time to engage in something like a watermelon seed spitting contest except we had no watermelon seeds.  Instead, they use Impala poop. Yes, the dried Impala poop is about the size of an M&M and can be propelled with great accuracy and distance if you hold your tongue just right.  Here, Grant, Malcolm, Andrew and I test our skills.  Not to be outdone, Brianna, the lone female student in our vehicle joined in.



As darkness fell, we got back on the Land Rover with Petros, our tracker sitting on the front with a spotlight, looking for red eyes of animals.

The hippo was out of the water since he didn't have to worry about sunburn. The spotlighting is the only way to see some of the nocturnal animals like the hyenas.

Then we came across a small herd of elephants who  made some threatening moves toward us, so we moved on.  We didn't want to make them mad since they were so close to our camp.

We got back and were famished and tired since we had been up for about 17 hours at this point, but dinner was waiting for us.  It was a wonderful buffet with singing and dancing for us afterwards.  Many of the students participated, and then we were safely escorted to our bungalows for a deep sleep.