Saturday, September 17, 2022

settling into safari luxury, and a first venture into Kruger national park

After a welcome sleep-in this morning, we met on the Hippo Hollow deck and were treated to the pleasant surprise of a family of elephants walking around by the river. It’s a little bit of a fake wild experience since they belong to the “Elephant Whispers” rescue center experience up the hill, which per Jamie is a slightly less than responsible tourism operation (simply because they offer things like elephant rides), but it was a really exciting little treat nonetheless, and a great way to dip a toe into the slew of truly wild animals we’d see in Kruger National Park over the next few days.

After checking out of Hippo Hollow (shoutout of gratitude to Nat who helped me out when I went to settle my bill, remembered I didn't have a wallet anymore, and Apple Pay didn’t want to work 🙏), we first stopped at a shopping center so that those of us in yesterday’s unlucky van could pick up some necessities, and then headed a short distance away to check into our home for the next few days, the Mdluli Safari Lodge.

This lodge is a new experiment in sustainable tourism, in partnership with the Mdluli people, a community who lives in villages adjacent to Kruger National Park and receives direct financial benefits from the lodge’s operations. Most of the lodge’s staff are from the Mdluli community, and many of them had never worked before – which is pretty amazing!

In the center of the courtyard is a statue of Inkhosi Mqoshwa Zephaniah Mdluli, the late senior traditional leader of the Mdluli Royal Family. He had a vision of this kind of community-beneficial lodge on their ancestral land, and though he died in 1998 this is really the realization of his dreams.

I didn’t realize that the whole place is brand new, having only opened in January 2020… pretty horrendous timing for tourism, so it’s incredible that they made it, and it was truly a gorgeous place – exactly what you’d picture in your head when thinking luxury safari.

Front (back?) porch. This hanging chair was so relaxing and inviting – I spent a lot of our down time there just sitting and listening to music and reflecting.

Indoor shower AND outdoor shower – take your pick!

Then, around 4:30, it was time for our first game drive. We met our drivers and guides for the next three days, Rick and Nico, split ourselves into two safari vehicles, and headed off into Kruger National Park.

The park itself is gigantic – about the size of New Hampshire, and taking up the whole northeast part of South Africa and stretching into Mozambique – so we were only going to see a small part of it on our trip. But it’s one of the best game reserves in the world, and has more large mammal species than any other park in the world, including the “Big 5” (lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, and African buffalo), which was a term that originated as a trophy hunting thing, but has since become sort of buzzy checklist of the top 5 animals to look out for. That said, there are tons of great African animals that aren’t part of the Big 5 (giraffes, zebras, hippos, crocodiles, baboons, lots of different antelopes, warthogs, cheetahs, not to mention all of the different birds and reptiles and such), so I personally wasn’t too concerned with that arbitrary checklist and was just excited to see what we could see.

September is a great time to visit, as it’s the end of their dry season. The greenery of the park is pretty bare (I’m sure it’s probably more picturesque when it’s lush and full), but the tradeoff of that is that it’s much easier to see the animals without all of the dense leaves and shrubbery.

Obviously this was the real deal, but as a Central Florida native I couldn’t help but think that the Busch Gardens and Disney Animal Kingdom safari rides are pretty authentic haha - when getting into the car (“keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle”) and having the guide latch the door from the outside, it definitely felt like a theme park ride. That feeling soon vanished once we were in the open expanse of the park, but I thought about it every time we piled into the cars over the next few days.

Jamie also was very much at home here, having spent a lot of time as a field guide and naturalist, and he was excited to teach us what he knew about all of the animals and plants.

(The photographer in me feels the need to caveat that for the next few days of animals & nature, these are a mix of iPhone photos and photos taken with one of Rachel’s real Sony cameras that she kindly lent me when she wasn’t using it. It’s fair to assume that the good ones were ones I took with her real camera haha. All videos are iPhone.)

Once inside the park, we were immediately treated to quite the sighting: a mama hyena and her newborn cub in a burrow right next to the road. I think she was a little cautious of us at first, but surprisingly just went about her business.

After driving for a little while, we found ourselves at an elevated rocky clearing where we stopped to have a sundowners drink and watch the sunset over the park. We could see some baboons in a tree in the distance, but otherwise it was still and peaceful, and more about just taking in this vast, truly prehistoric view of a landscape that hasn’t changed in thousands of years.

Once back at the lodge, we gathered for a buffet dinner outside in the boma around a firepit, overlooking the park. We were just sitting down when we noticed a few elephants right outside the fence, chasing what looked like an impala.

All in all an excellent closure to a nice first day of safari.