kruger national park & the colors of mpumalanga

We had a week off of school in April and IES took us on a nice little vacation. We left on the first Saturday and flew to Joburg and then drove 4 hours to Nelspruit. Joburg is in the Gautang Province in the north and Nelspruit is in the Mpumalanga province to the west of Gautang, about a 4 hour drive from Joburg and near the Swaziland and Mozambique borders. That first night we stayed at a backpackers in Nelspruit and then left for Kruger at the crack of dawn the next morning -- literally, we had to be up at 4 am. We arrived at Kruger just as the sun was coming up and right at the gates was already a herd of elephants grazing! It was really amazing.

Disclaimer: I will likely say "amazing" about pretty much everything I describe in the coming entry -- it was arguably one of the best weeks of my life.

Going into the park I wasn't sure what to expect, but already the scenery was beautiful. Rolling hills, only bush for miles and miles - Kruger is the size of Israel! We saw so many elephants on that first day. At one point, we were driving along a road next to one of the rivers and a herd of 20 + elephants crossed the road in front of us and went into the water!

To be out in the wild like that is an exhilarating feeling that I have never experienced before. We, the humans, had to stay in a caged area, whereas the animals are roaming in the open. I think its great.. the way it should be. They were here long before we were.

At the end of the first day we saw 2 lions right on the road -- apparently this is really rare to see them so late in the day. You have to be really quiet when you are near animals, especially predators. Lions are huge! Mostly, I will never forget the look in that one lioness's eye. We drove slowly toward them to get a better look and it looked right into my eye. Our guide told us that especially with predators, you can't make any sudden movements or put any parts of your body outside the frame of the car because it could cause it to attack. And the look in that lion's eye -- I did NOT want to mess with it! It's different from seeing them in the zoo because there they are relatively domesticated, but not in Kruger.

The second day was really exciting, especially in the early morning. We saw a cheetah and her cub and they were tracking some impala! (Impala are a type of antelope). You could tell the impala knew the cheetahs were there, and thus it was unlikely that the cheetah was going to get it. Cheetahs are fast but only over short distances. While it didn't catch the impala, watching it prick up its senses and survey the area like that was unreal. Cheetahs are endangered so seeing that was really lucky and our guide said it was in his top 10 cheetah sitings -- and he has been a Kruger guide for 8 years! We ended up seeing 3 cheetahs total that day, which is really lucky because there are only 200-250 cheetahs in Kruger, and over a large expanse of land.

On our third day we left Kruger and I was for sure sad to go. You see pictures of animals in the wild, but seeing them with your own eyes is something completely different. It gives you a new sense of your minute place in this world, a new sense of personal safety, but most importantly a new sense of the beauty of nature as it was meant to be, as it was for so long before humans took over a ruined so much.

One thing I have really appreciated, from all over South Africa, are the skies. When I went on that overnight hike in the Hex Mountains, I remember my friend John talking about the stars at night, unfettered by pollution and how it reminds you why they sky was so important to people in the premodern world. That last night in Kruger, me and Lull laid down in the ground and looked up at the sky for a long time. The moon was full and clouds were moving in scattered formations across the sky and it was breathtaking. It felt simultaneously like I was looking at the sky and like I was under water.

On the day we left Kruger we drove back towards Gauteng through Mpumalanga Province and stopped at a number of places along the way. Firstly, I'm really glad that we got to see a bunch of countryside outside of the Western Cape, which is the richest province in South Africa. I want to see a diverse array of the other communities in South Africa. There were lots of shacks scattered throughout the mountains. It was so beautiful though. We stopped at some waterfalls and Bourke's Potholes, which is a canyon with these pothole like crevasses in them. My favorite stop along the way, however, was Blyde Canyon. This is the third largest canyon in the world and it was breathtaking. Surreal, completely.