A beautiful pride of lions resting in the shade
The guys at Tinga: Gordon, William and Gerhardt. Aren't they the cutest?
A scene from Hitchcock's "The Birds"--Vultures in a naked tree
A Pod of Hippos
William, ever the teacher, instructing us on the wonders of dung
And the dung beetles industriously rolling their ball of dung across the veldt. Was it Sisephys who was condemned to forever push a rock up a mountain, only to have it roll down again? This seems about as thankless a task.
The next day we had two more game runs with William and Manuel, early morning and late afternoon, and each was more wonderful and informative than the last. We saw giraffes, a hyena, huge fat black millipedes that William picked up and let crawl on his hand, as well as a whole pod of huge hippos wallowing at the river’s edge. We learned that hippos are related to the whale, that they mate, give birth, suckle and sleep under water, although they can only stay under I believe for up to fourteen minutes at a time. We learned that the hippo is the most dangerous animal to people and that more humans are killed by hippos than any other animal including the Big Five. When a hippo makes a growling noise, opens its cavernous mouth, and bites at the water, look out! It’s about to charge! They also have been known to swim under water and tip over boats.
At one point, William stopped the truck, bent over and picked up some nasty looking stuff and announced that it was time for our shit lesson. He showed us small round pellets (impala poop, or dung as we now call it), medium size pellets (giraffe dung), and large compacted balls of rhino and elephant dung. He proved to us that these varieties don’t smell bad because they are from vegetarian animals and are made up of vegetable matter only. The dung beetle is a fascinating little character. I think I posted a picture of one of the fearsome things struggling to right itself in front of our hotel room door. When they fly they are apt to hit you smack in the face, and in fact Don got hit several times, luckily not to the point of unconsciousness.
Anyway, the dung beetle’s mission in life is to collect little bits of dung (I’m not sure if they are particular about the variety or not) and roll it into a ball which they then bury—to what purpose I’m not sure. But it’s quite interesting to watch one or several of the walnut sized bugs pushing and rolling and adding to the ball until it is two or three times its own size. This keeps them busy all day until dusk when they take to flight and fly into your face or smack you on the arm, giving you a severe case of the heebie jeebies.
We seldom had to drive more than a few minutes without seeing something. We saw a whole herd of elephants that second day as well as two venomous snakes, the snouted cobra and the puffed adder. William, ever the teacher, told us the difference between poisonous (you have to ingest the poison through your mouth) and venomous (you have to be injected with the poison through fangs). Manuel proved his talent by spotting the most beautiful green lizard which William leaped out of the truck to capture for our up-close look.
We saw a white rhino cross the road right in front of our vehicle, a “dazzle” of zebra grazing not ten feet away, a bare branched tree loaded with vultures that looked like it was right out of a Hitchcock movie, a klipspringer (another antelope type I’d never heard of) sitting on a rock, and another small pride of lions with a beautiful male and several females and cubs.
That evening we were treated to a Boma, a traditional African feast which the staff prepared just for us since by then we were the only guests at the lodge. There was a huge bonfire in the middle of a large clearing fenced with bamboo poles. Tables were set up and a buffet with many exotic foods like barbecued kudu and ostrich meatballs was ready for our perusal.
The next morning we went on our final game run with William and Manuel before leaving Tinga and Kruger for
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