Day 30 – Kruger Safari Day 2

February 21st, 2008

We woke up at 4:45am to eat some breakfast which consisted of coffee/tea, an apple or banana, muffins, and rusks. Now I had never heard of rusks before so I'll just take a sentence or so to explain. A rusk is essentially a dried up, hard muffin that you have to dip in your coffee/tea to make soft, then eat. It wasn't too bad.

Our morning drive was really eventful and full of animals. I'll leave most of this up to picture telling but we were able to see two male lions lying down in an open area, hippos, a rhino, elephants, and many many more.

The morning drive went until about noon when we went back to our camp to have some “brunch.” Brunch consisted of eggs, bacon, sausage, and hash browns. The bacon and sausage weren't like anything back in the states. The bacon was much wider and better in my opinion, and the sausage was more like a mini-corn dog (which I love).

After brunch most of us just took a nice little siesta (nap) since we were still catching up on our sleep from the previous two long days.

Around 6:30pm we had a night drive with someone from the actual park service. Regular people aren't allowed to go out before 5:30am or after 6pm due to the dangerous environment that can arise. Only qualified people can take groups out to see animals at night. For a few hours we were able to see a lot of animals while the sun was still up. I got a lot of good pictures of the BEAUTIFUL sunset in Kruger as well as full video of the sunset. Once the sun was down we weren't really actually able to see many animals, even with the lights that we had. It's true that a lot more animals come out at night but that doesn't mean that it's any easier to see them. After a few hours we headed back to our camp to grab some dinner.

Tonight dinner consisted of buffalo and ostridge meat, both of which were delicious. For this dinner we had another small group of 3 people join us. They set up their safari through the same group as we did and I'm actually pretty good friends with two of them. During our dinner their tour guide (Michael) said that he had a surprise for us. Our guide noticed that we had a special interest in hippos during our first two days. The surprise was that we were going to go see Jessica the Hippo. The website is jessicahippo.com. Anyway, Jessica is a hippo that was rescued from the floods in Northern South Africa in 1998. She was less than a week old and was found in the back yard of a couple who live with a river in their backyard. The house is located about an hour away from where we stayed in Kruger. Jessica is the only tamed hippo in the world. Hippos are known to be some of the most dangerous animals in the world. They are responsible for more human deaths than any other ground animal. They're also able to charge at up to 30mph. That's an animal that's at the very least a ton charging at you with a mouth big enough to fit two humans. Jessica was taken in by this couple and they raised it and took care of her. During the night she likes to go up INTO the house to sleep on a bed. She used to sit on the couches as well but after breaking 3 or 4 of them they only let her sleep on the mattress on the ground. She even knows how to open the door to get inside if it's shut. Lately a lot of popular TV stations have been covering Jessica such as Animal Planet and BBC. She's now ready to mate and will have a baby hippo late this year. Anyway, we're going to see her tomorrow. I'll talk more about her then.

Once we finished our complementary wine and the wine that we bought ourselves most people went to bed. Four of us stayed up for a few hours to play Eucker though. Right in the middle of our game (that we were playing in one of the bungalows kitchen, which is essentially a screened in porch), we started hearing some really loud noises come from the other side of the fence. Of course it grabbed our curiosity and we went out to see what was going on. It ended up being two hippos just grazing in the field about 200 yards away from us down the hill. No camera or video camera was able to pick it up, but it was really cool to see and just watch them graze in the field below.

By the way, the camp was surrounded by an electric fence (of which I ended up actually finding out was really electric even though there wasn't any signs indicating so). Somehow there were always deer within the fences though. When we first arrived I would seriously say that there was at least one deer sitting by every bungalow. Most likely just looking for food, but still. It was weird to see. As abundant as the deer were where we were at, they all managed to either leave or hide at night so there were none to be sighted. Crazy.

After watching the hippos for a while and concluding that no animal was going to come and kill then eat them, we went back to finish our game then went to sleep.