Day 23

Today started off with a game drive. It was pretty cool to start the day with a sighting of 3 Rhino. A female and her two calves. They are funny looking animals and look like little ballet dancers tip toeing away from us. This is kind of cool considering that the female probably weighed close to 2 tonne. We didn’t see much else during the drive in terms of big game but the other group spotted their first Lion in the Timbavati. It’s funny as Cendry, one of the Shangaan guys kept saying to us that there weren’t any Lion on the property. Well he got a rude awakening when he saw the big male lounging under a tree about a mile from the campus! They also saw a Black Mamba on the road on their way back to college. Pretty cool to see and I think that we’ll see more of them as the weather starts to heat up a bit more.

We came back to college to find a big male Baboon rifling through the rubbish bins beside the rooms. He was going through all the bins looking for food. We came out and scared him away after he made a serious mess of the place. These guys are very dangerous as their canine teeth are bigger in size than that of Lion’s. They can do some serious damage to you if you give them no option but to attack. Lots of tourists have been bitten while in Kruger Park when they’ve stupidly fed them. Anyway one of the Canadian lads told me a great story. One of the girls doing some volunteering work over here was coming back from lunch when she thought she’d watch a bit of TV in the TV room. She walked in to the room and thought nothing of the “person,” she saw watching the TV. She thought from the corner of her eye that his movements were a bit strange and it was only then that she realised that it was the aforementioned Baboon sitting down watching telly with a piece of a sandwich that he had nicked from the Bin earlier! She freaked out because she thought the Baboon was gonna attack her and that freaked the Baboon out. He doesn’t know which one of them ran out of the room first. That’s not even the funny part. Guess what channel the Baboon was watching? National Geographic! I shit you not!!

We went out for a night walk around the fence later on in the evening. It was quite unnerving to be looking out into the darkness with a piece of chain link between you and whatever might be out there. At one stage we think we spotted the Hyaena that we had been hearing whooping earlier on. We could see green eyes in the darkness but couldn’t really see the outline properly. I have a fair idea that they were Hyaena eyes anyway. The first rule we have learned is not to back down so we just kept our pace to see if we were being tracked. It was cool to be getting a bit of an adrenaline rush from it. There wasn’t any noise from the bush and at night all you can really here are the crickets. It’s just you and the stars. It is serene. On our way back to the college I saw my first shooting star. It was amazing. I guess I made a wish too!