Makana, South Africa, Africa
Pumba Private Game Reserve

We woke up this morning at 6:30am to go on our first morning safari, and I was so excited that I didn’t care how early it was. We met our ranger Justin, and he took us out in the Landrover at 7am with 4 other people.

The first thing we saw was a leopard just walking down the road that we were driving on, so of course we stopped. Justin said that the leopard is the most elusive of all the animals they have here, so to find one on our first day was incredibly lucky. It was cool to see how beautiful and majestic this animal was from only about 10 feet away.

The leopard stayed with us for about 45 minutes and we just had to wait for him to move. We are in their environment so we don’t move them on by honking the horn or anything like that. Once the leopard went on his way, we drove on to see a few white rhinos. Another Landrover showed up just as we were leaving the leopard, and apparently they didn’t get to see him for very long before he headed off into the bush.

The rhinos were absolutely massive, and just like in the cartoons, they had birds sitting on them eating bugs. We didn’t have time to head to a different area to find any more animals, so we headed back to the lodge for about 9:30am and had a great breakfast. I had eggs benedict, but instead of being on an English muffin, it was on a hash brown with a little bit of beef biltong on top. I can’t see myself ordering anything else for breakfast for the next two days. That was just too good to pass up!

We signed up to try archery, so just before lunch time we headed out to this little grassy area near the main lodge and Justin was there with his bows and arrows. An older couple joined us for the archery, but we were all bad. I was particularly terrible, and Melissa definitely had some beginner’s luck.

We had lunch at the lodge and watched a family of monkeys trying to figure out a way to get some of the food left on tables. They picked up a few sugar packets, but didn’t manage to get much else. The waitresses are pretty wise to their antics so they get the food off the table as soon as the guests move away.

We went for another safari drive at 3:30pm and saw a ton more animals. The first ones we saw were hippos. Justin took us down to a different watering hole where nine hippos were hanging out on land. As soon as we showed up they all made their way into the water and just kept their little eyes out of the water so they could monitor what we were doing. It’s hard to believe hippos kill more people every year than any other animal in the world, but apparently that’s true.

We saw some giraffes, impalas, nyalas, a night adder snake, a tawny lion, and some elephants. The experience with the lion was a bit scary because we had stopped next to this small clearing on top of a hill where Justin put out some drinks and nibbles. We were all just chatting and checking out the scenery when we heard the roar of a lion. It sounded like it was coming from not too far away, so Justin told us all to get back into the Landrover. He figured out where it was, and we took a drive around a corner and we could just make out the tuft of his mane while he was lying down.

Justin stopped the car and turned off the engine and we were just looking around to see if any other lions were going to show up. All of a sudden the roar got a little louder, and a little louder, and suddenly it sounded like the lion was only a few meters away from us. Melissa panicked so much that she ended up on some guy’s lap sitting next to her. She was convinced that the lion was going to jump up and grab her any second. It turns out that the lion just started projecting his roar and made it sound like he was getting closer, while Justin knew the whole time that he was still sitting in the same place.

We left the lion and headed down the hill to find some elephants. We saw a couple of male elephants fighting, which I had never seen before, so that was cool. We also saw a baby elephant down by a river and it was really cute. This was a really successful day of safariing, so we were thrilled.

We came back to the lodge for another awesome dinner, and then went outside for a short stargazing session with Justin. He pointed out a few constellations, and since there is no ambient light from a city anywhere near here, you can actually see the Milky Way! It was the first time I ever saw that, and I really wish I had a tripod with me so I could have gotten some pictures of it, but I’ll just have to try to keep that picture in my head forever.