THE first thing we saw when we got into the Kruger National Park was a guinea fowl. We didn’t know what it was at the time, but it didn’t look very ferocious, so we moved on.
We had a map which was tastefully adorned with pictures of animals. Deidre would tell me hopefully that, according to the map, there should be a leopard just round the next corner. Of course, there wasn’t.
By the end of the first hour, we had seen two squirrels and a mongoose and were getting rather bored with the whole wildlife scene.
Then we saw our first giraffe. We sat and watched it for ages, signalling our find to every passing car. Nobody stopped to admire our giraffe. We thought they were mad. Looking back on it, they must have thought we were pretty crazy. Nobody stops for a mere giraffe – the park is full of them. We were so new to the bush that, though we never dared admit it to anyone, we thought the impala were springbok! We obviously needed some reference books and I hoped our destination camp would have some for sale.
But we weren’t hurrying to our destination. We wanted to see as much as possible on the way – even if we didn’t know what it all was! We planned to arrive at the camp just before the gates closed.
Nature, however, had other ideas and soon had us giving up the search for game and looking for somewhere to pee instead.
Squatting by the car is strictly illegal, but there are times when there seems to be no alternative.
After a beer for elevenses and another with lunch, we were getting pretty desperate. I turned off the main road onto a dirt track and stopped.
In five seconds flat, the car was surrounded by baboons. One jumped onto the bonnet and started making faces at us through the windscreen. We made faces back at him and he laughed. I turned on the windscreen wipers, and he tried to catch them.
I squirted the windscreen washers at him, and he jumped onto the roof and hung down over the edge to look at us. Deidre shook her fist at him, but no amount of gesticulation or roof-banging would make him budge. When all possible hand signals had been tried, Deidre stuck her foot up to the windscreen.
The ape took one look at it and fled, gibbering, into the bush.
We decided that this was not a good place to get out of the car, so we had to hurry on to Lower Sabie. This was a pity because, in the next 15km, we saw impala, buffalo, bushbuck, waterbuck and wildebees, but we were in too much of a rush to be able to pass the time of day with any of them.
We also ran over a pile of what the Ministry of Agriculture would call ‘fertilizer’, which had obviously fairly recently belonged to an elephant. We had no time to look for the elephant and I was so annoyed at having missed it, that the rest of the trip became one relentless elephant hunt.
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