Leaving South Africa

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The first day was quite a tiring day since after the long flight we all got into the bus and drove almost until the night.
It is worth mentioning that our bus was no ordinary bus. :-)
Check it out!

Yes, her name was Carmen. :-) Everything we needed for the whole month, we had it on Carmen.

Our destination for the day was the Madikwe Game Reserve right on the border with Botswana but still on the South African side. We got there right before the sunset and the temperature was alright we were all wearing t-shirts.

The encampment was nice although there was no electricity nor running water.
For a hot shower you would warm up a bucket of water using logs and fire and for light at night it was like going back to the 19th century, we were using oil lamps.
Toilets...they were a hole in the ground of course. Electricity and running water are not available everywhere in Africa, we are used to it in Europe but down there... it's a very different story.

The plan for that night was to do a safari trip to go and see some animals. They are the most active right before sunset and at sunrise, this is because there is still light but it's not too hot, during the day is way to hot to wander around, even for the animals after thousand and thousand of years of evolution.

When we started the safari everyone was like...oh! look! a zebra!, look, look a giraffe!, oh my God! An elephant!!! every animal was amazing...after 3 weeks there.. oh! crap...that elephant is blocking my view!, bloody zebras! they are everywhere! After 3 weeks you were hoping to see difficult to find animals...like lions, leopards and the like...

Nonetheless, it was pretty exciting to see our first zebras, giraffes, elephants etc...

And our first white Rhinos, by the way, the name white Rhinos doesn't come from a colour it actually comes from something that got missed in translation. When the white men came to this country the natives called them wide Rhinos because the mouth is wider than on the black Rhinos and the explorers understood white instead so the names White and Black Rhinos stuck every since.

That small construction you can see below is man-made and it was made in order to provide water to the animals since there are no natural water sources in the reserve.

After the Rhinos it got pitch dark and I cannot describe how cold it was. I think everyone in the group was freezing we just couldn't wait for the safari to end. It was so cold that that's what I remember the most from the experience, the following day most of us had side effects from this cold night..in my case chapped libs.
Remember...is you go to a night safari...take a thick jumper with you...and a blanket if you can... you can thank me later. :-)

The sunset was amazing

And that was on our first day!

The following day we got up early in the morning for another safari and guess what... everyone was carrying a blanket and a think jumper! :-) We all learnt our lesson.

There was a point where one of the guides found a leopard in a tree and they never allow more than a couple of cars stopping in an area at any given time so we had to queue up and wait until one of the other cars came our way so we could take their place and as we were waiting this big fella was crossing the road with a few friends...

Another car came behind us and tried to skip the queue so our driver overtook him but in order to do that it got really, really close to the elephant that started to move its leg forwards and backwards and make threatening noises, our blood froze for a while... luckily the elephant seemed to reconsider and kept moving on leaving us be... none said anything for a while...we were the quietest car in the place...you could ear the flies passing by...
And then we got to see the leopard...

Actually we couldn't see the leopard, Ina that had one of those super cameras with an integrated telescope in it took the picture and thanks to that we could see it on the picture because it was way too far to see anything else but a yellow stain on a tree.
   Actually if you pay close attention you may notice that it's not only a leopard, its prey is also on the tree. This is something leopards do very often, they catch something and take it up a tree to avoid hyenas coming and taking the prey off them.

After the safari we went back to the base camp, back to Carmen and off to the road again, on our way to Botswana, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve