Christmas Vacation Part 3: Safari!

Imagine an exhibit on African animals in your local zoo. Elephants, zebras, lions, etc, all milling about their enclosures. People oggling the animals, the carnivores staring hungrily at the herbivores, everyone separated from each other by a wire fence as as three basketball players standing on top of each other. At least you see animals, right? But it's not really nature, is it? I mean, how authentic is your experience if you're staring at a miserable polar bear through a sheet of glass in the middle of a hot summer, while standing next to a frazzled mom saying "Timmy, gross! Take that used gum out of your mouth this instant!"

Now take out the fences separating the animals from the people and from each other. Take out the animals that don't belong in that part of the world. Take out Timmy and his ABC gum. And then put it all in a gorgeous corner of Africa  and you can start to imagine Kruger National Park.

Granted, the people are inside their cars, but the animals -- they're out, wandering around the bush, going about their lives in their natural habitat, completely oblivious to the people ten feet away from them, who are staring from their car windows with the tell-tale click-click-click of their cameras. And there's so many of them! Everywhere you turn, there's an elephant crossing the road, or a pack of impala hanging about, on the lookout for predators. It gets to the point where you start to say things like "Oh, look. Another baboon....no biggie."

We spent two days in Kruger and one day in the Maputo Special Reserve, and we saw so many animals. What follows is but a sliver of the wildlife we encountered.

Zebra, leopard tortoise, waterbuck, impala, elephant, rhino, wildebeast, hyena, baboon, lions, vultures, water buffalo, giraffes, ground hornbill, tortoise.

Next up: Maputo, the Big City!