Animal Encounters

I've Lost Track of the Days

I can tell I'm finally in full vacation mode. I have no idea what day it is. Luckily, Anne is in charge of the itinerary and reminds me that we're (tearfully) leaving Simbambili to get to our next safari game lodge.

But first: We had enough time to go on the morning game drive with Dean and Mamps where we saw more elephants and visited the hyena cubs we'd discovered the day before. Oddly cute.


On the topic of hyenas, we had a brief encounter with one the other night. We were just finishing up dinner in the lodge, which is a gorgeous, open-air space, when several people gasped in surprise. I turned my head just in time to see the spotted furry rump of a full-grown male hyena leaving the room. I guess he thought he'd pop in to see if there were any leftovers, but decided not to bother when he saw all of us dirty humans in the place.

The game lodges are not fenced in so the animals have free reign of the place. We're warned that we could have face-time with any number of wild beasts, so there you go. Hyena fun fact: their jaws have more crushing power than the jaws of life. So, they can eat almost anything and they especially like to chomp on bones. Hence, their dung is white.

One particularly cool thing we did on our morning game drive was to track two rhinos on foot. We had seen them grazing and after the requisite photo-ops, Dean and Mampsie suggested that we try to "walk the rhino." I was psyched (and I think a little too dumb to be scared).

There were eight of us, plus our tracker and ranger. Dean drove the Rover about 1/4 mile away and gave us our instructions: walk single file behind Mamps, no talking, no photos, do what Mamps does. Sir, yes Sir.


Mamps walked us back to the site. Apparently rhinos are pretty easy to track because they have very poor eyesight. Of course, they weigh about 3000 pounds, so you don't want to startle them. When we got within about 30 yards Mamps bent over forward. We bent over forward and stayed close. Then he crouched. We crouched and moved on. Then, almost crawling, Mamps scaled a termite mound. We crawled and scaled behind him until we were about 10 yards from the rhinos. I was holding my breath, my heart was racing, I think from a combination of the crouching, crawling, and scaling along with the fact that we were STALKING RHINOS. The rhinos, however, were onto us; they skittered away with all the grace that two two-ton tessies can muster. I guess we won't make such great trackers after all.