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.