Days 31 & 32: Into the wild, sort of

Days 31 and 32

Today I'm in: Nkomazi Game Reserve, Badplass, South Africa

I'm back!  As expected, the camps in the bushveld did not feature internet, so I've got some blogging to catch up on.  First up: I've got company.  At the beginning of Day 31 I flew from Cape Town to Nelspruit, a city in Mpumalanga province that's the main jumping-off point for Kruger National Park and its associated private game reserves.  Aaron, who flew in from Johannesburg, met me at the airport in Nelspruit, and we set out on the long drive to our first game reserve. 

I wasn't prepared for how beautiful the Mpumalanga province was.  The airport sits on a high plateau with views across valleys and mountains in each direction.  As we drove into the mountains south of Nelspruit we passed orange orchards, eucalyptus plantations and commercially-logged pine forests.  The only catch is that, being the beginning of winter, it's very dry.  There were brush fires all over the place, including one that obscured visibility so badly our driver almost had to come to a stop. 

Our first stop was the Komati Tented Camp within Nkomazi, a private game reserve about two hours south of Nelspruit near the Swaziland border.  Nkomazi was converted to reserve about 20 years ago from farmland, although the camp was not developed until about a four years ago.  And what a camp it was - our accommodation was a tent, but it had two large rooms, polished wood floors, a refrigerator, shower and bathtub and walk-in closet.  The staff at Komati were incredible too; we were met after each game drive with scented hot towels, cold drinks and sometimes even African singing and dancing.  

We were the only guests in the camp apart from Riaan and Nola, a honeymooning South African couple who currently live in Dubai (he works for a fitness firm there, she is a flight attendant with Emirates).  They grew up in South Africa but had never done a safari.  We had lunch and dinner with them each day and got to know them pretty well.  The schedule in the camp involved a lot of early rising - game drives left between 6:30 and 7:00 each morning to ensure we saw wildlife when it was most active.  Our guide was Louise, a wildlife-studies graduate from Pretoria who was really fantastic when it came to providing background information and details about what we were seeing.  

Game drives are essentially just that: you hop in the car and head into the veld to see who's moving around.  Nkomazi has animals on about 6,000 hectares, so it's not always an easy task, but Louise had been working in the camp long enough to know where many of the species congregate in the morning or where they had been sighted the day before.  Some of the larger, more valuable animals have been chipped, which made them a bit easier to track, but other species are deliberately not chipped, so they can't be located by poachers (who can also search for the frequencies emitted by the chips.) 

The large size of the reserve and the fact that these are wild animals mean you spend a lot of time bouncing around through savannah scanning for animals.  The most common are hoofed stock like impala, springbok, wildebeest, zebra and oryx - these reproduce quickly and serve as prey for some of the larger cats in the camp.  By the second or third drive they don't impress as much, although they do have some complex social dynamics that are fun to watch.  

Typically, just when you are getting bored and thinking about asking if you can turn back, you come across something really good.  We were bumping down a riverside path when two fighting warthogs came rolling out of the bush - something even Louise said she had never seen before.  We got to watch them tussle for about 25 minutes; the sound of their tusks slamming together was pretty harsh at times.  In the end they rolled back into the bush, but hopefully one of them beat the other.  

The reserve has a few rhinos, which over the last few years have become extremely scarce in South Africa.  They are poached relentlessly since their horns are thought to have curative powers by the Chinese and Vietnamese.  There are only a few thousand left in this corner of Africa, but Nkomazi was lucky to have two calves born on the reserve this last fall.  We were able to locate one mother and her baby (now about a month old) and watch them nose around for grass. 

We spent a lot of time searching for the reserve's lion pride, who are chipped and should therefore be easier to locate.  Several times the radio would be chirping like crazy as it found their chips, but they were nowhere to be seen - usually that means they're sunning on a rock out of sight or moving through underbrush on a mountainside where Louise couldn't take the truck.  You could also watch some of the other animals - like giraffes or impala - to see how alarmed they became, which usually indicated a lion nearby.  We eventually located one of the lions on our last morning, but she was heading for a hillside and we only got to watch her for a minute or so.  Fortunately there were more lions waiting at our next camp.  

On our second day we located the herd of elephants.  The reserve has ten of them, which doesn't seem like many until you see how much and how often they eat.  Ten is about all that can be supported by 6,000 hectares without stripping the entire property bare.  Louise kept a healthy distance from them - she said one of the females is notoriously unpredictable and charges quite often.  There's one male in the herd and three large females, one of whom acts as the matriarch and usually determines which direction they will move on a given day.

Toward the end of each drive we'd stop at a viewpoint for tea and coffee (in the mornings) or sundown beers (in the afternoons).  The weather was great - being in the mountains meant it was VERY cold in the mornings, but the afternoons were quite warm.  In the evenings we could get massages in a tent by the river or relax on the deck at our tent before joining the staff for dinner outside around a bonfire.  We didn't expect the camp to be so nice, and we were definitely sorry to leave after just three days to head to central Kruger.