SOUTH AFRICA . THE BIG THINGS IN LIFE

Mood status: “Tired” is becoming a theme

Location: Camping grounds, (near) Kruger National Park

The African sun hadn’t even gotten its chance to wake us up in any natural sense; we were up and seated in our game drive safari trucks and on our way to Kruger while it was still dark and bloody freezing. Nevertheless, we were all perked up and ready for the day ahead.

Starting at 6 am and following through to 3 pm in the afternoon, we were taken on one hell of a game drive. I’m not going to give you a massive, boring recount of what animals we saw – but the Big 5 were there. Straight from Wiki, the phrase Big 5 was coined by big game hunters and refers to the five most difficult animals in Africa to hunt on foot. The collection consists of the lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhinoceros. But we saw a whole lot more.

I found myself a little contemplative by the end of the day from something that our tour guide had said. After one of the many detailed descriptions of the sighted animals, he said: “Can I ask a question. Are you guys actually listening to me or just busy taking photos? It would mean so much more for you to see these things and learn about them, then to have photos to take home and show your friends”.

Of course, we said yes, yes, we’re listening – while snapping away - but I wonder whether we were. He would ask us questions on things he had already explained, such as “so is that a giraffe a male or female?”, and we wouldn’t have a clue. But he explained to us once again how to tell: look at its horns and see whether they were hairy or not. It was enriching for me to know these little quirky thing. Why had I bothered taking pictures of something I knew nothing about, and didn’t even care to learn about? I was ashamed to pull out my camera after that, and tuned in on every single explanation that came out of his mouth afterward.

*I have refrained from adding any animal photos for obvious reasons. However, this one of two elephants playing together in the water made the cut only because it was the highlight of my trip. They were extremely cute as they wrestled!

P.S Camping ended up being fine! I can SO do this!