Kruger

Kruger National Park got its start in 1898 when Paul Kruger, President of the Transval Republic (which in 1910 joined with the Orange Free State, Cape Colony and Natal to form the Republic of South Africa) placed an area now in the southern part of the park under protection. It was then nurtured into existence by its first warden, James Stevenson Hamilton, whose mandate was apparently to make himself a “damned nuisance” to the park's opponents (mainly hunters and farmers, I assume).

Today Kruger is the crown jewel of the South African park system, comprising 20,000 square kilometers of grasslands and scrubby bush, and boasting the largest variety of animals of any park in Africa. It is also the breadwinner for the whole system, supplementing many of less profitable parks with the income generated from its one million annual visitors.

Fellow IISD intern Laurel and I took a couple days off work last week and spent a long weekend in Kruger. We entered the park at the northern end (actually looks more like the centre on the map, but everyone refers to it as the north - should sound familiar to 99% of Canadians) and then over three days worked our way south from camp to camp. Kruger has a large network of camps, from the fully stocked variety (there are about a dozen of these) with restaurant and bar, gas station, the odd swimming pool, and a wide range of accommodations, to more rustic set-ups with nothing but “safari tents” (canvas huts) and bathroom facilities. We spent a couple nights in our own tent at the bigger camps, and one in a safari tent, which was pretty deluxe by comparison (comfy beds, fridge - for which we had no use; I unplugged it before going to bed - and patio).

We quickly settled into the Kruger routine, which involves rising at between 4:15 and 5:00 a.m. (the excitement of going in search of animals made this less grim than I had expected) and heading out onto the road as soon as the gate opens (5:00 if you go on a guided drive, which we did once; 5:30 for the general public). Because of the relative abundance of animals that can eat you in Kruger, you're confined to the enclosed camps at night (apparently you are fined if you arrive after lock down, but I can't confirm this as we always arrived with a good three or four minutes to spare), and with the exception of a very few view points and picnic spots are not allowed to leave your car. We would then spend the day driving around in second gear and peering, unblinking, into the bushes. I got pretty good at driving for quite extended periods of time without actually looking at the road.

The thing that struck me first about Kruger, and this was accentuated by the aridity of the area we entered in at, was the desolation of the place. Everything seemed, well, dead. Small scratchy trees, scorched earth and a tar road were all we could see when we came through the gate. It was pretty bleak compared to the lush rainforests of home, and I wondered how it could sustain much life at all. Then within about five minutes we came across a couple giraffes grazing ten feet from the road. Half a kilometer further on, elephants. Then a herd of buffalo. Then impala, one of the most beautiful of the park's many deer species, everywhere. It was unbelievable.

It was hard for me to be in Kruger for the first time, though, without being a little bit obsessed with “The Big 5” - so-called as the five most dangerous animals in Africa to hunt on foot. These are the leopard, lion, hippo, rhino, and Cape buffalo. I recall backpacking through Europe ten years ago with my tick list of must sees - the Mona Lisa, David, Eiffel Tower, Blue Mosque, Acropolis etc. - and I had a similar fixation on the Big 5: until I had seen them all, I wouldn't be able to relax and just enjoy the place and the experience in their entirety. This is a pretty narrow-minded approach to visiting any new place, and cherry picking from the wild seems particularly absurd, but there it is. So although I got a pretty good feel for Kruger in the end, and loved it, I hope I have the chance to go back when I will be more receptive to all that this magnificent park has to offer.

All that being said, on to the hunt!! The tricky ticks were the cats. We saw our first lions about 100 feet off the road in long grass. Up until then I had been looking pretty intently for lions, but after this first sighting, when I realized they were next to invisible unless on the move or lying next to a line of cars, I let up a little. In this case, we joined three or four other cars and sat, for about 45 minutes, peering through our binoculars to catch glimpses of mane, paw, or exciting moments of action such as a stretch or yawn. Lions spend up to 20 hours a day sleeping, which is the perk, I guess, of being king of the jungle (or savanna). The difficulty in seeing them enhanced, I thought, the magic of being with these animals in the wild, and even from a distance and inside the car it was pretty exciting. We were told there were as many as a dozen lions in this particular pride, though we could only make out four or five. We also saw lions – two mothers and some cubs – much closer to the road at the end of the trip.

We saw a leopard on a guided night drive from one of the camps. He or she was injured, unfortunately - possibly had a run-in with a porcupine - and we watched him/her quietly for five or ten minutes sitting in the bushes just off the road, licking his/her wounds. Needless to say, we couldn't tell if it was male or female, or somewhere in between! Also spotted a leopard resting in a tree on the other side of the Oliphant's River - looked pretty comfy, curled up on a big branch not far off the ground. The dead duiker in a tree that you will see if you go to the photos link was put there by a leopard. It had been there for some days when we saw it, however, and seemed as though it had been abandoned. Leopards are opportunistic hunters, killing prey when they have the chance and storing them in trees or some other private spot. Our guide said he once saw three different deer species, all leopard kills, sitting up in the same tree! In this case the duiker was in a tree right on the road, so the leopard may have been discouraged from coming back to eat it for that reason.

Finally, for the cats, our big breakthrough into Land of the Lucky came on our last morning when we encountered a mother Cheetah and four cubs. Our guide, Jan, hadn't seen Cheetah in a month, so I felt pretty blessed to see them this morning, hanging out on the plain and playing together. But that was just the beginning! For the following 45 minutes or so we watched in what, really, was awe, as mother stalked a group of impala that were grazing three or four hundred metres away. There was very little vegetation on the flat plain between her and them, so she had a pretty tough job ahead of her. The space was so flat and open, and here we were watching the fastest creature on earth staring down her prey, that I felt as though I was sitting on the edge of a runway, waiting for a jet to take off!

Shortly, the impala crossed the road in front of us, so mother Cheetah shadowed them behind us into more favorable, bushy terrain. At this point a number of the impala seemed to catch wind of her, but she just stood her ground and they continued grazing. The cheetah never spared us a glance throughout, but I wondered if perhaps we and other cars that had arrived were a distraction (visual or olfactory) to the impala. In any case, the tension in our safari jeep rose, and there was almost no sound from the 15 or so of us this whole time, as predator and prey converged in tiny increments. Once a cat has targeted the animal she is going for she won't let her eyes off it, even if other animals come closer or pass in front of her and her target. So as the group of impala started moving on a diagonal past her she lay and waited, having crept as close, I suppose, as she thought she could.

In the middle of this drama Jan took us a couple hundred metres down the road, where a spotted hyena was lying in the shade, and then returned five minutes later. His timing was perfect, as the cheetah burst into action just as we arrived. My heart is speeding up just thinking about it!! It was over in fifteen seconds, and in fact the impala won the race. Barely. The cheetah was upon it in seconds, accelerating to close the gap between them incredibly quickly (considering that the impala would've been getting up to about 60km/hr). But I guess that was the easy part, because then they weaved back and forth as one for a number of seconds before disappearing into the bush. Shortly after we knew the outcome when we saw cheetah back on the prowl. Within only 20 minutes or so she'd be able to take another go at it, but of course the impala were aware of her now, so we’re not sure how she did later that day.

So there it is. I'll almost certainly never get another 15 seconds like that again in my life, but I think the moment is seared into my memory! And all in all it is a trip that will stay with me. It was just such a special experience, watching animals all day in the wild. And such animals! Rhinos, elephants, zebra, giraffes, hippos, lions, leopards, cheetah, impala, kudu, nyala, warthog, hyena, waterbuck, wildebeest, buffalo. I could have sat and watched any one of them all day. And then there were the birds! Eagles, storks, heron, starlings, vultures...the more I think about it, the more it sinks in what a wonderful place Kruger is, as I'm sure is any such place that excludes humans for the benefit of others. Of course, Kruger is riddled with roads and dotted with camps, but it seemed to me in my short time there that perhaps other animals can deal with that. The fact that a pride of lions would lie beside a road all day long - and the procession of cars would not have ceased for a moment - when they could just as easily have walked half a kilometer away out of sight, suggests that, when people are quiet and respectful, they can indeed share space with other creatures.

Finally, I haven't had too many “I'm in Africa!” moments since coming to Pretoria - which sort of just happens to be located in Africa - but this was certainly one of them. We were in the car all day long, but we were on the earth. We passed over savanna and along riverbanks and beds, into sunsets and wind, in the heat and the cold. I don’t know about tracing my ancestry back to Africa - I think the blood must be a little thin by now - but it nonetheless felt rooted, and rejuvenating. So much life began on this continent, but it was, and still is, a hell of a place for humans to build civilizations. As a result such a wealth of the planet’s most magnificent creatures have managed to survive all the way to the age of conservation, and for that I am very, very grateful.

More photos here: http://ca.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/philipkakins/album?.dir=/4188