African Safari Adventure

So this past weekend I had an opportunity to head up to Pilanesburg National Park to go on my first safari. Lets just say this was an adventure indeed. Pilanesburg is about a 3 hour drive from Joburg so we left around 7 AM to get ample time at the park. We were planning on spending around 4 hours driving around in our own car then spending 3 hours on the official park sponsored, tour guide. I loved the beginning part of this trip. It was absolutely gorgeous to see the beautiful landscape with mountains in the backdrops while many different animals all around. I also enjoyed it because this is one of the only socially acceptable times for a human being to act like a dog and stick his head out of a car window for an extended amount of time. Gotta find those lions off in the distance.

The first part of the journey on our self guided tour, we definitely found plenty of wildlife. We saw countless zebras, giraffes, wildbeast, kudo, warthogs and impalas. We also did get to catch a hippo while we were overlooking a watering hole. Here is one of my favorite ones... 

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Unfortunately we didn’t see any of the Big 5 (lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants or buffalo) on our self-guided tour, but we still had the 3 hour tour with the park rangers to help us find some of the more elusive, rarer animals around the park. So around 30 minutes before the tour started, we decided to make our way to the gate to meet up with the tour and that is when the rest of the day became REAL interesting. As you would guess, the roads in an South African National Park are not at tip top shape. And when your little sedan roughs it out with the potholes, 9/10 times the potholes will win. And this is exactly what happened. We hit a pothole and cracked our oil plate and all our oil spilled out on the African trail. This put us in a very interesting dilemma. We are in the middle of an African Safari, where we may have seen 5 cars the last 4 hours and we have no cell service. On top of that, one of the park rules is that you are supposed to stay in your car at ALL TIMES because you have no idea what could be hiding in the brush. People die every year because they want to walk around, get a closer picture etc. So you can see the pickle we are in. So we decided to go with the risker choice and get out of car, and push it to the nearest intersection. Luckily, there was only a pack of wildbeast and zebra’s in the distance and no lions, rhinos or elephants to kill us(at least from our initial glance). After about 20 minutes, a lion actually jumped out of the brush and almost attacked Jonathan! … no that didn’t actually happen. Would have been a cool story though… Instead of a lion, it was another car coming down that path. Marissa and I hitched a ride with this Czech couple to head back to the gate to call a tow truck.( interesting 40 min car ride considering between the two of them they spoke about 5 words of English). To make a long story short, after spending many minutes on my phone with the insurance company, towing company and tow truck driver, It took 4 and half hours to finally get the truck down there. By the time we got to our car, it was dark out and the tour was long completed. So unfortunately, no lions or elephants or rhinos were seen on this weekend’s adventure.  Guess I’ll just have to save that for another journey.

So, moral of the story?? There was a reason why Jeeps, Land Rovers and other 4 wheel drive vehicles were created. For times like these. Next time I'm or you are on a safari, leave the sedans for the city roads and get a Jeep (Logan, where are you when I need you most?)