Last Monday we packed up the cars and vans and headed for our next location – Skukuza. We were told that the trip would take about 8 hours, but almost immediately we were delayed by a flat tire. It ended up being a very long car ride, but it was worth it because the scenery was so beautiful. There are a lot of hills and mountains here, but it’s very different from home because most of them are covered with only grass, or very little vegetation. A lot of the ride was up in the tops of the mountains, with lots of tight turns and dips in the road. At one point, we did drive through an area that looked like home, with lots of hills covered in thousands of pine trees. My professor who was driving told us that it is one of the largest man made forests in the world. The trees were imported from Australia to use in potential paper mills, but the paper business never really took off, most likely because it isn’t too easy to access the trees in the first place. As a result, there are now miles of pine trees in a place where you wouldn’t expect to see them.
Skukuza is different from the first two places that we stayed because it is a major tourist attraction. It’s located in Kruger National Park, which is South Africa’s largest national park. It’s also the headquarters for the park and holds the largest tourist rest camp. Before we even entered the tourist camp where we will be staying, we drove through the staff village, where most of the staff with my program has their permanent houses, and the research village, where visiting researchers stay while they study here. I definitely didn’t expect such a large community within a national park, but the number of people who live here full-time is impressive. We are staying in a large dorm building within the tourist area. This area is fenced off to reduce the risk of animals entering, but there’s always the chance of animals jumping the fence. The facilities are very nice, and in addition to having a pool right outside of our rooms, there are also two restaurants, a store, a post office and a library to use while we are here. There are lots of tourists here, as opposed to our last two locations where it was basically just us. It’s nice to have some modern amenities (namely internet) back again though.
So far we’ve been on a lot of game drives because Skukuza has a lot of interesting animal and plant diversity. Everyone here refers to the “Big Five” which are the five animals that people aspire to see in Africa – elephant, lion, leopard, rhino and buffalo. So far I’ve only seen two, elephant and rhino, but with the amount of time that we spend outside in the field, there’s a good chance I’ll see the rest before we leave. The other morning we also had the opportunity to see a group of African wild dogs, which are pretty rare to see. We were on a hill overlooking them, and from that view it looked like they were stalking prey, although we didn’t have enough time to stay and find out. Another animal that I really like here is the impala. They remind me of the deer from back home, except they really aren’t fazed to be around people. Everywhere we drive, we pass by groups of them grazing on the side of the road. Only the tiny young impala are ever startled by the cars.
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