The Night is Dark and Full of Terrors

Day 3 - Kruger National Park

I rose early to find the enthusiasm for birds that Mike had inspired in me the previous day slightly diminished. Some feathered bastard had sat himself out the back of our tent and called for hours straight during the night. Hopefully he'll have been eaten by an eagle by the evening. I should perhaps have been a mite less enraged though as over a cursory breakfast Mike and Bridget reported hearing hyenas outside their tent. All this is perfectly normal and fine. As we mounted the jeep a change in the wind direction reminded us again of the first stop on our safari. The elephant was even less fresh than the day before but still the vultures and hyenas raced the bacteria to gorge themselves. A pair of white rhinos mooching in the dawn gloom presented a more arresting sight and was another of the big five ticked off. I feel like I should be allowed to count half an elephant on the list but, alas, not even a whole elephant counts (despite their excellent memory...). An eagle surveyed the breaking day from a high perch, I silently willed him towards our tent. Soon a herd of zebra plus an adopted wildebeest were up and mowing the grass. Antelope, from the large kudus with their sculpted horns, to the small pronking impala, appeared from the shadows. The sun began its heady ascent and another day came to life in the African bush. Sort of. The sun's ascent was behind thick, chilling clouds that flung cold beads of rain into our faces as we sped through the landscape. Sandra soon retreated into a cocoon of blankets and every picture through my camera lens was rendered a dimensionless haze. The struggle was real. We perked at a nuclear family of giraffe pruning the tall trees. Gregg kept us interested with engaging commentary and neat tricks such as fashioning a toothbrush from a twig and pointing out a tree that could supply a sort of toothpaste. Very handy because if I ever found myself alone in this place dental health would be of paramount concern. Mike was as sharp as ever and as the drizzle lifted I was able to get some great shots of hornbills and rollers and other birds that are colourful and have names.
After the jeep pulled in at the end of our morning safari I strolled the camp breathing in the quiet ambience. Three thin wires strung between wooden posts circled the camp and divided this oasis of what, in other times, would have been called civilisation from barbarous nature. Monkey's played on its periphery, canvassing spiky bushes for their fruit. Inside a small bushbuck crept quietly on the manicured lawn. The fence was real, the divide was permeable, our safety was made of invisible belief. We'd placed our faith in people we'd never met and a good Tripadvisor score. Experience let through the antelope and kept out the lions....we hoped.
Invisible barriers again enveloped us come the afternoon as the floating island of safety that was our 4x4 cruised through the bush. The landscape looked so benign, like an English heath after a particularly hot summer. But it was red in tooth and claw, step outside our bubble and all bets were off. Gregg pointed out a variety of mistletoe that had grown fist-sized fungal pods all over a hapless tree and drained the life from it, a cheeky kiss it was not. Buffalo skulls lay here and there dissolving as tiny moth larva burrowed into them by the hundreds. Every second of every day something out here is planning to consume you. We humans have come a long way since this was our daily fight. We travelled along an empty track-bed that once bore rail and trains through the Kruger. The station here was long gone but Gregg pointed out a couple of nearby trees that waiting passengers would climb if lions came by. So maybe we haven't come a long way really, maybe the urge to thrust ourselves into new and dangerous environments will never diminish. Perhaps the horizon will ever lean forwards and we shall always want to pave it.
Some people will make safari their entire holiday, to come to a country and pick one experience. Some people go to Disneyworld for two weeks. Pluto or a pride of lions, space mountain or springbok, some people know what they like. Safari would seem to present the more authentic and unpredictable experience, the thrill of what majestic natural scene you may find yourself observing each new day. I felt that too, a ruggedised wonder that I could have sustained for far longer than 3 days and 2 nights. But, to corrupt a valid scientific theory, anything that is observed is also changed. You need only find yourself stroking distance from a wild lion to ponder again that invisible wall that you sit behind. The first rule we were given at the outset of the safari was not to get out of the vehicle. Sensible enough. But what made us more edible outside of the vehicle than inside it? A house cat could have leapt into the seat beside me let alone a lion but the 4x4 was 'safe'. With caveats. The second rule was don't stand up in the vehicle. This one was a bit less obvious, would my long, toned legs prove irresistible and overpower simba's natural reluctance to jump aboard? Surprisingly no, it would actually break the silhouette of the strange hulking creatures that regularly followed these lions around but neither threatened them nor resembled suitable prey. In short, a group of people can park their 4x4 next to a pride of lions and not get attacked because in the past lots of people had parked their 4x4s next to this pride of lions. Safety in habituation. How does a relationship like that get established in the first place though? The actual word 'safari' was introduced into the English language by Richard Burton, he of wild adventures and luxuriant moustache, who spent his days charting the inner reaches of Africa rather than playing with Elizabeth Taylor's asp. He picked it up from the Swahili word for 'journey' which came in turn from Arabic and was brought over the red sea by traders. Safari only began to resemble the activity we know it as today when Europeans started to voraciously carve up the blank, dark shape on a map they called Africa. They'd have likely carried some rather more effective weaponry in those days than what we seemed to be packing in our jeep. Apart from my heavy zoom lens that could, at best, have concussed a squirrel the only other means of defence we had on board was a wooden stick about a metre and a half long long that was mounted where the windscreen should have been. It had a rounded end roughly the size of a tennis ball and looked like it would be far more useful in a BDSM dungeon than in fending off a wild animal. I never asked Gregg what he used it for. Nor did I ask if he kept a gun in the glovebox in case the faeces/dung/scat (we'd been educated on the differences) hit the fan. Belief, faith and hope.
Another animal in the big five was playing chicken. As our vehicle rounded a corner we found the road ahead a brown, heaving, cantankerous mass of undulating ungulates. Whilst in death a moth may eat them (have you been paying attention?) in life a horde (correct term, don't check) of buffalo belligerently bore down on us. We stopped as they streamed to our left and right, 12 tonnes of supposed danger. they're no bigger than domestic cows but having walked through herds of cows in the past I have quailed a little at the damage they could cause if the mood took them. And a chicken is bigger than a quail. The rest of the day's safari only brought smaller sightings like rabbits and nocturnal chameleons we were boma-bound again.
The eagle had done his Darwinian duty and I woke after a better night's sleep to find the 'real' world beckoning. Jeep on dirt track waited, to offload us onto minivan and tarmac, onto plane and air. Safari was wonderful for all of its barely acknowledged, and practical in-authenticity. It satiates our residual yearning for the trees and the mud and the unbroken distance, that line where the sky meets the ground and all things are possible. It connects us, if tenuously, to the land where we first threw back our shoulders and offers the only meaning to our lives we'll ever likely get. The hostile world once surrounded us here but now it is us grown mighty and we who surround it. It is us that bites and gnaws on it's defenseless flanks, swallowing whole chunks without ever being full. I am certain I would like to see this world again, I am less certain it will be there to be seen.