South Africa - Part two: Kruger National Park

After flying back from Cape Town, we rented a car and hit the road for Kruger National Park where we spent three days on safari.

This is the road entering into the Park.

Within 15 minutes of arriving in the park, we came across some elephants along the side of the road. It was a really great introduction to the park.

This was the view out our back door the first night. You can't see it in this photo because my camera thought that branch sticking up from the bottom right was really neat to focus on, but there were hippos across the river making lots of noise.

The first morning we were in the park, we woke up early to meet with a tour that was going on a walk in the park. Our main guide took the rules very seriously and sent away one woman because she was wearing white, which was against the rules. As we got out of the truck to start the walk, he told us that we needed to make sure that our cameras were set so they didn't make any noise and that the flash was turned off so nothing unusual would cause problems with the animals. He also encouraged us to walk quietly by rolling our steps. With 8 tourists trailing behind him, I don't know how stealthy he thought we were going to be, but we did spend over half an hour crouching down as we were very close to a white rhino and it's baby. I wasn't very familiar with my camera and the auto flash kept coming on every time I powered it up, so I didn't get any pictures of that rhino. I'll admit, I was too scared. It was a pretty awesome experience to be within 30 yards of an animal like that though.



This is a picture of ticks that were on a plant along one of the game trails we traveled. Yep that's pretty big. Nope, I didn't give any of them a ride.

This is something else I wasn't afraid to take a picture of.

I was pretty confident I could take this worm too...



This flower was too nice to pass up. There were a lot of flowering plants since we were there in the rainy summer season.

These flowers weren't too scary either.

The next day, we were at a different camp and went on another sunrise walk with different guides. One woman who had signed up for the tour showed up in white pants. These guides didn't have any problem with it and loaded us up on the truck to leave. We knew at that point that this tour was going to be different from the previous day. We started off seeing animals right away. We had been off the truck for less than a minute when two fighting baboons came bursting into the clearing, circled around us and the truck and then made their way on out of sight. Shortly after they left we heard a loud growling noise in the distance off to our left. Our guides said, "Did you hear that? Those are lions." They then led us off in the other direction. Though we didn't get as close to any animals as we had the day before, we did get to see more since we weren't crouching down trying to be stealthy for large periods of time.

There are White and Black rhinos in South Africa. They are both this color. The White Rhino are called such after the Dutch word for 'wide' which describes their mouths. White Rhino have a big, wide smile type of mouth, while Black Rhino have more of a pointed beak type mouth. These are White Rhinos. The Black Rhinos are endangered and are much more scarce. They are also more aggressive and tend to attack without provocation and won't stop stampeding until you're dead. If these were Black Rhinos, we wouldn't have hung around long enough to get this picture..

Another rhino pic.

A couple of juvenile male Wildebeast.

We came across this dug out hole. One of our guides made his way around and leaning over, peaked in to see if anything was hiding in the den. He indicated that there was something there so I went and stood where he was in this picture and leant over to take a picture.

This is what I saw. Can you spot the tusks?

Here's a close up. As soon as I pressed the button to take the picture, now very confident that my autoflash was off and my camera had all sound disabled, the animal in the burrow bolted out straight at us and then, upon seeing all of us standing there, did a figure 8 and took off in the opposite direction.

It was a warthog. Here is a picture of one of his family members, I got later that day.

The guards were pretty casual with their rifles. At one point while we were taking shelter in under a tree while we waited for the rain to ease up, one of them asked me to hold his rifle while they collected some plants to 'make dinner.' I suspect it was more to smoke after dinner... They also let my cousin Heather and Uncle Harley pose with it when we got back to the truck.

Because of the rain, we came back very muddy. I had a band of mud on my calf above where my socks stopped and my shoes were so caked with mud, I was standing at least an inch taller.

Each day, we would drive to the next camp that we would stay at that night. Along the way we would sight see and try to spot as many animals as possible.

Some animals were easy to spot.

This elephant was flapping his ears to try and cool off.

There was a whole group of these monkeys playing along the side of the road.

This giraffe was also easy to spot.

We came across this man riding his bike along the side of the road in the preserve. My uncle told him that he thought it would be a dangerous activity. The man replied, "Not every time."

Some things were harder to spot. Can you find the crocodile in this picture?

Here's a close up.

This is a Baobab tree. None of us were willing to get out of the car to give a sense of perspective, but it is not unusual for these trees to grow trunks in excess of ten meters wide.

This cheetah and it's mate were hanging out under a tree very close to the road. One of them was injured so they weren't moving even though there were more than ten cars stacked up along the side of the road queuing up to see them.

We saw a lot of baby animals of all types.

These lion cubs were hanging out in this thicket about fifteen meters from the side of the road.

Here's a closeup of them.
Behind them in the distance were a herd of impala that were darting first one way and then another. We were hoping that Mom would show up having caught dinner but after half an hour, we moved on. We came back about an hour later on our way back to camp. The cubs were still there but no sign of Mom and the herd of impala had settled down. I guess no dinner for them tonight.

I was able to get some great panorama shots from a big bridge that spanned this valley where we spotted elephants, hippos, crocodiles, turtles and more.

Our driver on one tour was willing to get out of the truck to give us a better view of this hippo skull.

We saw hippos that were alive too.

These are a couple of Water Buffalo.

There were places in the park where there were large cement water cisterns. Windmills would provide power to pump water from these cisterns into a trough along the ground nearby. This windmill had a cool bird nest in it.

This elephant was drinking out of the water cistern. You don't have to worry about crocodiles when you drink from these...

Zebras were common in the shorter grass areas.

There were these really big spiderwebs that we could spot along the side of the road while driving. It brought to mind the huge spider characters from Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.

I asked what kind of spider made these huge webs and our driver got out to show us. You can see in this that the web is as tall as he is!

The little spot in the crease under the joint of his thumb is the spider that lives on that huge web. It turns out that web is like a condo for spiders, housing around 500 of them cooperatively.



As my trip came to an end, I was extremely grateful for the opportunity I had to go on this trip and for the experiences I had. I wasn't too excited to get back on the airplane for the long trip home, but as they say, all good things must come to an end.

South Africa - Part one: Cape Town

In December I went with my cousin Heather to visit her parents who are on a mission in South Africa. Here are some pics and a few stories/explanations.



All of you Football (Soccer for those of us in the States) fans know that the World Cup is going to be held in South Africa in 2010. They are ramping up for it. Building new stadiums all over the country. The funny thing is, there is no parking around any of the stadiums. No one there really have cars... I don't know how they are going to transport the large numbers of players and fans to the stadiums, some of them pretty remotely located. I heard there was talk of bringing in buses but the local taxi drivers didn't like the buses taking their business and were shooting the bus drivers. So probably not buses.


This is my Aunt Mia and Uncle Harley with the recent graduates from the 'Ye Shall Have My Words' literacy program. My Aunt and Uncle aren't giants, though they are taller than me...


Typical housing for a lot of the people they teach. You can see the power lines coming off the light poles. Most of these homes will have one bare bulb for lighting and an electrical outlet. Often toilet facilities are communal yet they still manage to come to church in pristine white shirts and ties.


We visited a couple of church buildings with this layout. Four prefab trailers were arranged to form a covered courtyard in the middle. One was larger (a double-wide maybe?) and used for Sacrament Meeting. One was a restroom. The others were divided in to multiple rooms and were used for Sunday School, Primary, Relief Society, Priesthood, etc.

We traveled first to Cape Town. It is a beautiful city, but very windy while we were there. You can see the whitecaps in the ocean.

This is the waterfront in Cape Town. I was checking out some sea lions in the water below.

This clock tower at the Waterfront was a very good site, when we finally got there. When we first arrived in town we asked people at the hotel, "Where can we get tickets for the double-decker bus tour?" and they told us by the clock tower at the waterfront and wave their hand toward the general direction of the ocean. The way they were saying it made it seem like only a couple of blocks so we headed out on foot towards the waterfront. It turned out it was quite a ways and we ended up walking in all directions for over 3 hours totally clueless before a kind local woman went out of her way to walk us down to a point where we couldn't get lost. We gave her taxi fare so she could get where she was going.

The view of Cape Town from the cable car station at Table Mountain. It was really windy up there.

This was my breakfast one morning. It was Belgium pancake wrapped around a banana with cinnamon, sugar and caramel sauce. Yummy!

This was lunch another day. It is a stew made with a couple of local antelope species and served with rice. That whole cauldron was all for me. It was very, very good.

Heather said that her husband Zac wanted her to bring home a Great White. We took this picture of Heather and her mom at the Natural History Museum instead.

They did offer cage dives so you could get up close and personal with the sharks, but this is as close as I got...

This is the view of Robben Island from Cape Town. Robben Island is like South Africa's Alcatraz. It has a long and varied history of usage since the 1600's.

It's been a Leper Colony. (The graveyard is all that is left. They burned all of the other buildings when the colony was closed to avoid contamination.)

It's been a convent.

And most recently, it's been a prison where political prisoners like Nelson Mandela were held. This is the entrance from the dock.



This building held one prisoner in solitary confinement for many years. I don't remember his name, but after several years, he had a visitor who reported that he was unable to speak after not using his voice for so long. The buildings in the background were built later as kennels for the guard dogs.


This is a limestone mine where the prisoners would be forced to work. Most prisoners who were kept on Robben Island suffered eye damage from the glare of the rock. Because limestone had so little value, they stopped mining it and just had the prisoners move a big pile of it from one side of the mine to the other and then back again. The cave in the picture is a place that they would go to rest and relax. It was also in this setting that they would teach eachother. One of the things required by international aid organizations was the opporturnity for education. As a result most prisoners left with advanced degrees earned through correspondence courses. The attitude of the political prisoners was very accepting, even allowing guards who were interested in learning to join them. They saw the guards as victims of a bad system as much as they were. The government found that the guards became too sympathetic with the prisoners and started limiting the time they would serve on Robben Island before being transferred. They also tried for a time to put the political prisoners with real hardened criminals but found that they too were positively effected by their contact with the political prisoners so that stopped too.


This is a typical cell where 80 or more men would be housed. There is no glass in the windows. They fought the elements year round.



Political prisoners were of many faiths and races. This mosque was built on Robben Island to honor one of them. (I don't remember his name and probably couldn't spell it if I did...)



This is the view of Cape Town and Table Mountain from Robben Island. Very pretty.


This is my "I was there" shot from Robben Island with Table Mountain and Cape Town in the background.


Robben Island has the 3rd largest population of African penguins. It was really fun to watch them move around and play in the water. I almost missed the ferry back because of these guys.