Kruger

Hurrah for Easter break!

Schools in SA take a week for Easter, but since classes are slow to start back up the week after, many students take an additional week as well (Africa time). We are taking two weeks off, devoting that time to a jaunt through the wilderness of Kruger National Park, a quick homestay in the Limpopo region, and a week in Johannesburg. Hey, when in Rome...

After an uneventful flight from Cape Town to Nelspruit, we are introduced to our guides for the duration of the Kruger leg of the journey. They are experts on the wildlife in the region as well as reliable drivers once we get to the park itself. There is Xolani, a taciturn and gracious driver who speaks all 11 of South Africa's official languages; Jimbo, an affable frat star who shares my love of offensive jokes and recreational sexism, and David.

David could readily be described as the Forrest Gump of South Africa: he has interacted with some of its most famous people and influenced some of its most prominent aspects whilst remaining fairly anonymous. He knew Steve Biko before the latter's death in police custody, was roommates with Zackie Achmat (the crusader for gay rights and AIDS awareness who brought antiretrovirals to South Africa), and was also married to one of South Africa's most well-exposed playwrights. He was in exile for a good period of the 1980s and also studied at Northwestern. He is an expert on everything from animals to languages to poetry.

NB - most of these folks I've just mentioned are commies, but they're lovely people and great conversationalists, and I'm an open-minded person. Don't go thinking Yours Truly has lost his love of free markets.

We enter the park, and as if placed there to give visitors a taste of what's in store, a pair of hippos wade grumpily through the water below us with their eyes above water, shooting us a misanthropic glare.

"Yeah, yeah, welcome to Kruger. Ooh, look at me, I'm a hippo. Sorry, what was that? Am I 'hungry hungry'? Ha, ha, never heard that one before. Now bugger off."

A typical day in Kruger goes as follows: wake up at the crack of dawn (5:00 or earlier) to go on a morning walk or drive (it's easier to see animals before it gets hot in the afternoon), go home for breakfast, grab a nap, eat a late lunch and go to the store for booze and cigarettes supplies, go on an evening walk or drive, grab dinner, enjoy the evening air with a beer or two, and go to sleep quite early.

Having grown accustomed to humans, most animals here don't shy away from the cars, but that doesn't mean that it's safe to be outside. When going on a walk, we are accompanied by two park rangers armed with elephant rifles in the event of getting charged.

The gun is designed to pierce both the flesh and bone of an elephant or rhino, which as you can imagine is quite a chore. It will break your collar bone if you don't hold it snug to your shoulder.

Oh yeah, also, it takes a .458 Magnum round.

To put things in perspective, this is a .44, and no matter how lucky you felt, Clint Eastwood could perforate you with it.

So, yeah, they're not messing around. However, this gun won't work on lions or leopards, as it penetrates without causing enough damage to drop a lesser animal.

Even in the middle of the day, there are plenty of exotic beasts to behold: here's some from my first day in Kruger:

The lovely zebra.

Giraffe. Easy to approach and surprisingly difficult to spot.

Warthog. Find yourself a meerkat and see if they sing "Hakuna Matata" together.

Another fun sight is the baboons, who are surprisingly human in their mannerisms and have apparently developed a master-servant structure, as this picture of one grooming another illustrates:

"Don't ruffle the seams, Jeeves. Then tell Mrs. Claypool to make up the tea, and see Colonel Arbuthnot into the drawing room when he arrives."

Elephant. Seeing these beasts up close makes you realize that there's no better way to cross the Alps and pillage Rome.

On our first morning walk, we learn the difference between white and black rhinoceri: White rhinos are grazers (eating grass) and black rhinos are browsers (eating branches, bushes and shrubs). You can easily tell this by pulling apart a bit of rhino dung, and if contains twigs or thorns, it is a black rhino.

So how do you tell if you don't have time to sift through piles of poo, and if the rhinos you're watching aren't peckish? Well, you can tell by whether or not the baby rhino walks in front of the parent or behind the parent.

Black rhinos are browsers, which means they spend more time around trees. This makes them susceptible to an ambush from in front by some tree-borne predator, such as a leopard or a cheetah. That said, a black rhino parent will always go in front to protect the child. The grass-eating white rhino will more likely experience an attack from behind from a predator avoiding its line of sight, so a white rhino parent will walk behind its calf.

As if on cue, we run into four female rhinos, and against my better judgment, the guides take us to within a hundred yards of them.

Pictures do not convey the author's terror.

Later on, during the same walk, we hear trumpeting in the distance. Less than a minute later, there is the sound of branches being trampled, and the trumpeting is much louder.

"We'd better move on," says our ranger nonchalantly. "It sounds like those elephants are heading this way."

And so we walk briskly in the opposite direction, looking for higher ground to avoid the herd of pissed-off, five-ton quadrupeds racing our way.

We also got a peek at the wildebeast, a scrawny and haggard-looking species of antelope.

In Jimbo's words, wildebeast look like buffalo with HIV.

Oh yeah, and this happening on the evening of the fourth day.

This thing pictured below walked right up to the car and crossed the street like it owned the place. You could see the disdain in the laid-back, confident swagger, and the wide stance of the hips and shoulders as it sauntered along was pure John Wayne.

"Sorry, pilgrim, I was distracted by how awesome I am."

Surprisingly, the lion is not the most dangerous hunter out here; in fact, its hunting success rate is lower than 40%. Far more dangerous is the leopard (60%-70%) or the elusive wild dog (as high as 80%, nearly hunted to extinction because of its ability to decimate prey populations). But still...it's a freaking lion. We'd seen a couple females before this one, but that mane is a head trip to see up close.

Kruger is not without its problems. Poaching is still a huge issue: the rhino's horn is still believed by many to be an aphrodisiac and can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars for just one horn, and elephant tusks are still highly prized despite the international ban on the ivory trade. Kruger rangers have met this threat with harsh measures: poachers may be shot on sight. An the afternoon of day three, while in Jimbo's car, we notice a truck full of rangers headed the other way. They are armed not with the elephant rifles, but with automatic Heckler & Koch 5.56mm assault rifles. While useless against animals, they are extremely good against people.

Seems a bit excessive, huh? Not at all. The poachers crossing into Kruger are armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and are more willing to be killed than captured.

Another debacle facing the park is the elephants.

Elephants have no natural predators. They have impermeable hides, tough tusks that can pierce almost anything (including other elephants), and dexterous trunks that allow them to manipulate objects in their environments. They are immune to most diseases in the bush. In short, even though elephants give birth less than any other animal, they can quickly deplete the available resources in an area (especially since they travel in groups).

Culling elephants is problematic, however. Previously, only adult elephants were killed. Sounds OK so far, right?

It isn't. Elephants are extremely intelligent with a complicated and intricate family structure. It was observed - after several years of shooting only adults - that orphaned elephant babies grew up with problems we would associate with human children who had witnessed their parents' death in front of them.

Zoologists observed that elephants who had lost family members were antisocial and vengeful, with penchants for physical violence against humans, often lethal.

This, basically.

This is not even a joke. Elephants have excellent memories, and there have been reports of elephants attacking hunters, even waiting years and traveling hundreds of miles a la Vito Corleone.

Mio padre era Dumbo, e questo è per lui.

Eventually, since the administration did not want the elephant equivalent of Charles Bronson stalking the veld, this policy was changed to an even harsher one: kill every elephant in a herd: babies, matriarchs, parents...the lot.

While this did wonders to prevent a generation of elephant sociopaths, herds of elephants communicate with one another, and when one herd vanishes without a trace, the other herds will avoid the area they were in.

Also, it is hard to kill elephants. Jimbo has told the following story from his time taking disabled children into the bush. An elephant came up to the car to play with the humans inside, running its trunk over all the people inside, except for the crippled child. With this one, the elephant knew intuitively to be gentle, and didn't prod the child as forcefully with its trunk. Elephants are soulful animals, and killing them has been described by all as traumatic.

As of 1994, all culling against elephants has stopped, but it remains to be seen whether or not Kruger can sustain them, as no viable method of fairly controlling the population exists yet.

I'm ending on a depressing note again, so here's a picture of a kudu (400 lbs. of raw muscle) running in front of a car.

Gorgeous.