into the wild

                I was speeding down the highway at nearly 70mph, swerving left and right to avoid deep potholes that sporadically dotted the asphalt in both lanes.  Heather had the road map sprawled out on her lap, frantically flipping through the pages and trying to decide exactly where we went wrong.  We were lost and we were late.  The sun was slowly dropping below the horizon, and we didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of a game park at night. 

                After twelve hours of driving, sight-seeing, defeating hang overs, getting lost, speeding, and completely scratching up the rental car, we were ready for bed.  But alas, the safari was not over yet.  It was dark, and there were hyenas creeping alongside our car, and Heather was screaming, and I was rolling down the window and coaxing them towards me.  To put it simply: it was awesome.

                 We had woken up especially early that morning to get into the park as soon as we could.  Unfortunately, the Black Labels that we drank the previous night got the better of me, and we were an hour late to the park’s opening.  I was furious with myself.  Going on a safari has been a dream of mine since middle school, and I was going to be hung over for most of it.

                We wolfed down a quick breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee and hit the road.  We were loaded with more beers (yuck), binoculars, snacks, our iPods, and a half-tank of gas.  Heather was perky and optimistic; I was crabby.  But not two minutes into the drive, while I was slumped over the steering wheel, I noticed a dark shadow in the bushes on my right.  I slammed on the breaks and Heather whipped out the binoculars.  There were two enormous rhino grazing quietly in the brush next to the road.  They were massive.  It was absolutely incredible to be so close to such a prehistoric-looking creature; I had to keep reminding myself that we weren’t in Jurassic Park.

                Within the next few hours, we had seen a small herd of zebra cross right in front of our car, giraffes grazing in the distance, wild dogs sleeping under a tree, lots of gazelle, a beautiful thing called a kudu with long, curly horns, warthogs scampering and snorting in a ditch, and a baboon that begged for food near us while we picnicked at a rest stop.

                Later on in the afternoon, we made a bold decision and began driving towards the far end of the park.  We wanted to make it from one end to the other in a day, and besides, there were far less cars the deeper into the park we drove.  It was much more peaceful.  It’s not to say that the other park visitors weren’t friendly; we were stopped on numerous occasions by Afrikaners to “check out the wild dogs sleeping under the tree just a-ways back!!!”  Afrikaners must really like their wild dogs. 

By this time, my hang over was subsiding and I was on a roll.  We were chatting animatedly and driving aimlessly through a windy dirt trail, windows down and music blasting.  We stopped and got out a few times to take pictures at “look out” points along the river.  But the sun was disappearing, and we thought it best to be responsible and head in for the night.  Just when we made a sharp turn around the bend to head towards home, Heather screamed and scared the living daylights out of me. 

There was a massive giraffe not two feet off the road, eating leaves from a tall tree nearby.  We raced for our cameras and rolled down the windows.  I brought the car to a slow creep, and we were soon close enough to reach out and touch the giraffe.  He looked at us uninterestedly and kept eating.  It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.  We sat there in the car for a few minutes watching him until he wandered further into the bush. 

We were finally on our way home.  We snapped a few photos of a beautiful sunset and decided to speed up a bit to make the 6pm gate closing time.  We far underestimated how long we had been driving into the park; I was soon speeding along the paved road while Heather fidgeted in her seat and kept wondering out loud what would happen if a large animal wandered into the road.  When we turned a corner and came across another herd of zebras trotting along, Heather described them as “fucking terrifying”.  A few minutes later she concluded that all animals terrified her at night.

We were half an hour late, and the gate guards made it quite apparent that they weren’t pleased with us.  They asked if we were held up by animals in the road; we lied and said yes, there’s a huge zebra crossing just down the road!  The darned things wouldn’t move for half an hour!

I think both of us slept harder than we had in a long time that night.  I fell asleep and woke up in the very same position.  We still had another three jam-packed days left in our Great African Road Trip Safari Adventure.