Skukuza Camp in Kruger National Park

I slept well in my thatched roof hut last night, and woke up before dawn. On our way out of camp, we saw mongoose and I told Dylan that was a good sign of things to come. We had three routes to choose between, and I didn’t have a preference. We started out in one direction and less than a minute later, he felt like we should go in a completely different direction so we turned around. He was right!

Within minutes, we saw a pack of 5 wild dogs! There are only ~400 in all of Kruger, which is almost 7,580 square miles (larger than Israel, almost as large as Massachusetts) and Dylan hasn’t seen African wild dogs in over 5 years, so we were excited to see more than 1% of the whole population as the sun was rising. The dogs were on Dylan’s side, and he asked if I could smell them (we were less than 15 feet from them). I couldn’t, so I crawled across him to get closer. It was funny because then all I could smell was him (freshly showered) and when I said “I can only smell you” he thought I was telling him he smelled like a wild dog. I finally did smell the dogs, and I can’t really describe it except it’s kind of a cross between musty and dried blood?




In addition to the mongoose and wild dogs, we saw more hippos, elephants, giraffes, impala, kudu, bushbucks, hyenas, crocodiles, warthogs (aka Little Tuskers), another large herd of buffalo, squirrel, lizards, and bats. We saw a lot of birds today, including vultures, giant kingfisher, woodland kingfishers, ducks, Egyptian geese, stork, oxpeckers, and a bateleur eagle (whose name is derived from the French word for acrobat).


We are having fun on our drives. Most of the time we are silent, just listening to the sounds of the birds and insects while we look for interesting animals. Sometimes (especially when I am likely to fall asleep) we talk, about everything from domestic abuse to domestics (many people in South Africa have domestics aka maids). We’ve talked about differences and similarities between ZA and USA: food, eating habits, divorce rates, marriage age, language, nicknames, and more. And we always have some good laughs. Sometimes we think a rock or log is an animal (i.e., see the wood giraffe and real giraffes below):




Today, I announced that down a certain path I had seen either a hyena or a warthog (they look VERY different, so that was a random announcement but it turned out that it was a hyena). And we had a chuckle when I asked a question about whether a certain path was the same one we took yesterday afternoon, instead of saying “no” Dylan said “not really, but close” because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

I really enjoy the water pressure here in Skukuza, so I took the time to wash my braids this afternoon before the evening game drive. They’re in pretty good shape overall, except the roots look raggedy. My guess is that I typically lose ~100 hairs per day, but since they’re all braided together right now, the hairs fall out of my scalp but are stuck in the braid. As a result, the white bulb at the follicle (which I have never really noticed that much before) sticks out from the braid near the base of my scalp, and it kind of looks like dandruff, which isn’t so nice. I can pull them out (it doesn’t hurt, I pull it out of the braid since it has already come out of the scalp), but it’s a slow process because I have to pull each hair out one by one. So for now, I look like I have a crazy case of dandruff…. Nonetheless, the braids have been WONDERFUL and functional throughout Africa, and they were well worth the effort. I’ll just have to get them taken out as soon as I get home.

Our afternoon drive was low-key. We saw baboons that made us laugh (like always) and many of the animals that we’d already seen. We enjoyed ourselves, despite not finding the elusive cats. We had dinner under the stars (there are countless stars, and I can see the Milky Way so clearly) and topped it off with a small taste of Amarula (my fav drink since Geoff introduced it to me many years ago). We laughed about different words used in America and South Africa. My favorites so far are salty cracks (saltine crackers), robot (stop light), and jelly babies (a candy shaped like human babies, very strange to me). Dylan’s favorite is still charley horse. I also enjoy the use of “fancy” instead of “want” and “best” instead of “favorite.”