Prik Ki Nu

Well we haven’t seen any lions, tigers or bears (I don’t think they have bears in Africa anyway). We are not at Zulu Nyala after taking a short flight down to Richards Bay. We arrived here around 1pm and were met by the staff who took us on the 90 minute drive to the game reserve. We’re staying in “safari tents” which are permanent structures with partial walls (front and back), complete bathroom and canvas sides and roof. I’ll post some pictures later.

After getting settled we took a 2 hour game drive out into the bush. We saw all kind of animals including elephants, buffalo, springbok-like-things (can’t recall the full name). After the drive (oh, I forgot to mention the flat tire episode) we went and had dinner at the Safari center.

This morning we took a game drive at another location fairly close by. Here we saw a rhino (from a very long way off) along with lots of Zebras, more elephants, monkeys and lots of other cool stuff. Later this evening we took another drive at Zulu Nyala (where we’re staying) and saw an amazing amount of wildlife including rhinos and hippos.

We’re being driven around in converted land rovers with canvas tops and very sturdy roll bars. The roll bars have made a great mounting post for my bogen superclamp which is working great as a shotting platform for my 20D + 400mm + 2x lens doubler This is giving me the effective length of a 1200mm+ lens - very nice for shooting things a long way off but you need to have a steady hand and a steady platform. It also helps that the ranger turns off the jeep’s engine whenever we stop (no engine vibration).

So far we’re having a good time - out of the other people here, we’re met a very nice mum and daughter from Vancouver, BC. Tomorrow we’re off to the coast for a boat trip at St Lucia where we’re supposed to see lots of water wildlife (including crocs!).

by Nigel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 9:23 pm and is filed under World Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.