Peter was our boat safari guide. His goal was to get us as close to the hippos without getting us charged. A safe distance is about 20-30 feet away. They are very territorial. Peter taught us that there is only one male in the groups. If a baby boy is born the mamma has to safely send the baby off to live on its own or else the father will kill it. Once it's grown up and strong enough it will come back and try and kill the father. While we were cruising around we'd often see one lone male, sadly watching, what I assume to be, his family, from the distance. tear.
At one point Peter pointed out an African eagle in the distance. We all ooohed and aahed as it sat atop a tree 500 yards away. Next think you know peter whistles and throws a fish up in the air! To which the eagle, giant and graceful, swooped down and grabbed the fish out of the water. It was great!
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| From Africa or Bust |
Beautiful, right?
Next we de-boat onto Crescent Island. What? We're getting out? Crescent Island was the location of much of the wildlife filming for the movie Out of Africa. They cherry picked animals out of the wild, plopped them on this island to film and never returned them home after filming. Since then, they've had families and grown into fairly large herds... and we were walking among them. Is this safe? Peter promised us it was. We were there for about an hour and saw waterbuck, zebras, wildebeest and giraffe. All of which were promised wouldn't charge us.
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| From Africa or Bust |
Until these trouble makers, african buffalo. Hello?! They're coming right at us!
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| From Africa or Bust |
As we're walking around, watching our every step in the very tall grass for giant ant eater holes in the ground, peter calmly takes his coat off, swings it dramatically over his head and yells as us to all go the other way... and quick. What?! Where the hell are we going to go?! One poor lady with us doesn't even have a knee cap! We're not exactly in a position to run for our lives here. So maybe 3 minutes go by and he waves us back as the buffalo just stand still in a group. What? I'm not going that way! So we all took a very wide swing around them over beyond the trees to see the giraffe.
Here is Joanna, happy we made it :)
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| From Africa or Bust |
As we left the island, a group of lazybones waved us off and said "did you see any snakes!?" haha! ugh, it's a good thing they didn't tell us THAT before. But it was still very cool to be SO close to such amazing animals.
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| From Africa or Bust |
I'll certainly never forget our very first walking safari. Next time I'm going to ask before we get started if anyone has any thing OTHER than a jacket to save us if we get charged by buffalo.
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| From Africa or Bust |
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