Staring Baboon at Kruger National Park.
Baboons can really be an obnoxious animal and also quite dangerous. Definitely don’t want to have one too close to the vehicle as they may climb in an open window or just snap the antennae right off.
Greetings from Kruger National Park day 2, 2014.
Sunrise over the Nwanedzi River
Safari, which in Swahili means journey, also means getting up before the sun for the best time to view wildlife. Joan is always up by 3am and gives me about another hour of sleep before waking me with morning coffee. So although I don’t like to wake up so early I do love being spoiled.
We pause on the bridge over the Nwanedzi River to watch the Black and White Cranes and look for other wildlife as well.
Luck of the draw is seeing a Hippo out of the water, which is rare during the day, and watching it plod across a sandbar from the bridge to submerge with others of its kind.
Kudus
Animals are most often far from the road and viewed only through binoculars but sometimes we get to see them them right on the road and even have to follow them until they decide the grass is greener on the other side.
Or in the case of the buffalo, soaking in a nice mud pool.
But it’s not always an easy life for wildlife and evidence like the remains of this elephant are occasionally seen.
So ends day two of safari at Kruger National Park South Africa as we head back to Letaba camp, but there is more to come.
It seems that almost every semi-large body of water in Kruger National Park has hippos, dams or lakes and rivers. And with all the rains lately there is water everywhere.
Hippos hang out in water in large groups called rafts during the day so they don’t sunburn causing their skin to crack.
When the sun goes down they haul their 2 to 5 tons of body and walk up to 4 miles to graze on about 150 pounds of grasses over night.
This makes them rather difficult to photograph as they look rather like boulders in the water.
On occasion more than their eyes and nostrils appear above the water like when they open wide which looks like a yawn but usually shows aggression, or sometimes play.