Africa Day Three - Afternoon Game Drive

After tea we all piled into two separate jeeps and headed out into the bush for our first REAL game drive.  I was in Gavin's jeep, (our A&K guide), and roughly half the family was in the other jeep with T.T. - a guide attached to Stanley's Camp.  

I wound up choosing to stay in Gavin's vehicle for the entire trip, and here is the reason why - he was AMAZING at pointing out all the intricacies of the environment around us, and not just what he probably imagined we were there to see - the Big Five, or the cats, or the elephants, etc.  He is an incredibly enthusiastic host when it comes to showing off his adopted country, and I think he really gave us an appreciation for things that we might not have otherwise seen with another guide.  More on this as we truck along here.  In the meantime, photos!

Well that didn't take too long. Case in point. As we're driving, Gavin stops the car and hops out. He marches out into the grass, and indicates a shrubby purple flower. He tells us it is a Vlei Ink flower, and it lives in a hemi-parasitic relationship with the sedge grasses he's standing in.  Hemi-parasitic meaning it obtains some nourishment from the sedge grasses, but also photosynthesizes.  Then he finds another small, purple flower.  He plucks it and hands it to us in the car, and as he does so, he says, "this is one of our bush cures - Vernonia glabra.  That plant there will cure Gonorrhea and Syphilis." We eyeballed him because we didn't know if we should take him seriously or not. I mean really? But he was adamant. "It absolutely does. The root of that flower will cure those two diseases."

Further up the road, he stops again to indicate a tree with some very strange looking fruit. He said, "that is the Sausage Tree, and its fruit, mashed into a poultice, will cure skin cancer." Now he must have sensed again that we were all sitting in the back of the car thinking he was some kind of witch doctor, because he became very animated and went into an in-depth discussion of why the various pharmaceutical companies don't utilize the bush cures the way they should...something about profit margins and so on and so forth. Listen, whether or not that plant cures skin cancer, I can't tell you. But I am dead certain that Gavin 100% believes it can, and he gave me no reason to doubt, ever, that he knows exactly what he's talking about when it comes to Africa and its native flora and fauna. If Gavin says it's so, then it is SO.

Important safety tip when camping in the bush.  Do not put your tent under a sausage tree.  Those things will drop through the roof of your tent like lumpy torpedoes.  

Look! It's a Red Billed Hornbill!

Look, it's a Yellow Billed Hornbill!  What do you mean you can't tell them apart?

This was my first spot: a Greater Kudu doe.

The guides always tell you to keep your eyes peeled because although they're doing a lot of looking, they're also doing a lot of driving. I spotted the Kudu doe on this drive. Shortly after that I spotted an elephant that turned out to be a termite mound, a baboon that turned out to be a termite mound, and a lion that turned out to be a stump in the side of a termite mound.

Possibly I should have just rested on my Kudu laurels.

Helmeted Guinea Fowl. The stupidest bird on god's green earth. Too dumb to get out of the way of a moving vehicle by getting out of the road.  Instead they all run in front of the wheels.  The entire bloody flock of them.  Morons.

We also saw a Red Billed Hoopoe, (also called a Green Wood Hoopoe).  Sandy got a sort of picture of it sitting up in the palm tree.  

We saw baboons as well, but didn't get any good photos of them.  Don't worry, we did get good photos of baboons later on in the trip...

A Burchell's Starling - way more attractive than the starlings we've got at home.

An Aardvark hole in the side of a termite mound.

Photographing the Impala...

We saw Striped Kingfishers, and Blue Waxbirds, and Fork Tailed Drongos, and Woodland Kingfishers.  Not everyone was as enthusiastic about the birds as I was.  Gavin however was definitely a kindred spirit when it comes to the birding...

We also saw a Reedbuck.

We wound up by the side of a small waterway, and we stopped to admire a Yellow Billed Stork wading about in it, hunting. But the moment soon dissolved into helpless laughter. The stork we were watching found a toad in the shallows and commenced to eat it. Gavin called it an African Clawed Toad.

So the stork had the toad in its bill, and it was working it methodically up the bill, closer and closer to the crop. But either this was the stupidest stork ever born, or it was young and uncertain of how things worked, because it never tilted its head back and swallowed. So the toad, fighting like a demon the whole way, was worked carefully up the beak to the opening of the stork's throat, and then it slid alllllll the way back down to the tip of the beak again.

We all became really emotionally invested in the stork swallowing the toad. We were cheering it (quietly) on, and gasping with dismay when the toad once again slid toward freedom...and all told the drama played out for like, 15 minutes.

Finally, FINALLY, the stork managed to cram the toad all the way down.

He immediately went out into the water and started to wash his bill off. Gavin said the toads secrete this really nasty ooze to try and deter predators, and the stork wanted that gunk off his face pronto.

Once he ate his meal, we left that little water way and drove on. Suddenly Gavin slammed on the brakes, exclaiming, "Oh would you look at that! This is really remarkable, you all have to see this!" We were all staring around us, searching for the lion or the cheetah or the elephant or whatever it was that he'd seen that was so amazing.

He had us all pile out of the car, and there it was. The creature he was so very enthused over.

Yeah. It was HUGE. A Golden Orb Web spider. Gavin pointed out the tiny male of the species hiding in the web as well, (see it there in the bottom right corner?), and urged us to take photos with her against a dark background to get the best picture.

This was the very beginning of Gavin's campaign of Nes re-education on the matter of arachnids. I HATE spiders. You guys KNOW how much I hate spiders...so I am certain, absolutely certain, that you will all appreciate how very much I must have liked and respected Gavin. Because by the second camp, I was sharing my shower with a wall spider the size of a jam jar lid and I was NOT KILLING IT.

Clearly, Gavin Ford is The Man.

A Red Billed Francolin, also called a Red Billed Spurfowl.  These little dudes are dead handy to have around, because they kick up an almighty fuss whenever they see a big predator.  Gavin found leopards several times based purely on the noise the Francs were making.

A Coppery Tailed Coucal in a thorn bush. These guys have blood red eyes and they remind me, oddly, of the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal.

The light began to fail.  

We called up the other car on the radio to arrange a communal place to stop for Sundowners.  This has nothing to do with Alzheimers.  At sundown, when you're in the bush, you stop at a congenial location and have a few drinks and some snacks.  Gavin says its an ancient tradition and it would be terrible bad luck not to indulge it.  The men on the trip took advantage of the tradition to try some of the local brews.  The girls on the trip usually took advantage of the tradition to empty their desperately unhappy bladders.  *laughing*  Driving on a bush road is an unkind thing to do to an innocent bladder.    

But first, a Giraffe!  And a mess of Yellow Billed Oxpeckers.

Giraffe are like a form of public transportation for these birds. Combined with a buffet. They're like the dinner cruises you can take on rivers.

Wee adorable baby giraffe coming up...

We found the spot for sundowners, and everyone piled out and went about doing what they needed to do. There was a lot of photo comparison and review.

I posed on a termite mound. I felt like they owed me that much, after making me look like an idiot all afternoon.

Taking a picture of the sunset became traditional too. Here's the photo of our first Sundowner.

After we ate and drank, it was time to get back into the vehicles and head out for a night safari, using a spotlight. Kaiser, our native guide, was really good at searching our surroundings for things.

We saw a lot of impala, Kaiser was always careful to shine the light well over their heads so they wouldn't be blinded by it, as this would make them easy prey.

A chameleon:

We also spotted Bush Babies, a Small Spotted Genet, a Ground Dwelling Spider (eyeballs staring at us reflecting the light from a hole in the ground.  Un.F*ing.Cool.  I could have lived the rest of my life not knowing there are spiders big enough to have eyeballs that can reflect light at you visible from a vehicle three dozen feet away.  *shudders*), a Spring Hare...none of which photographed well at all, sorry...night shots are very tricky things...and then this happened.

It was so ridiculously awesome.  We heard a hyena set up a call a very far distance behind us, and then suddenly two hyena materialized out of the darkness, trotted right past our vehicle on the road, and disappeared again.  They were definitely Hyenas On A Mission.  Awesome.

And then we went back to camp, and had dinner.

Mmm.  Full Belly.  Time for sleep.