South Luangwa National Park, located in Zambia, is 9,050 square km. Marcus, Jodi, Roger, Jon, and I headed out quite bright eyed and bushy tailed at the prospect of seeing leopards at every turn. EVERYONE we had spoken to about the park basically told us there were leopards everywhere and they'd just be chilling in the trees above us. (Jon and I were really hoping for a semi-repeat of our cheetah experience in the Mara. I think we set our sights just a bit too high...)
(Also, I'd like to warn you in advance there are no pictures from the morning game drive because I forgot my phone. My B. But look out for the ones below from the afternoon drive!!)
On the way into the park we encountered...a LOT of baboons, hippos, and crocs. From there...things got slow for a while, with a few giraffe, gazelle/impala/puku, and elephant sightings. Then our guide, Moses, told us he was going to take us for a real elephant experience and instructed us to remain very still and quiet. He drove up to about 20 feet from an elephant and shut off the engine. The elephant proceeded to walk closer and closer to the truck...until he touched it! He got right up next to the hood of our car and ran his trunk along the top of the hood, feeling it out. He stayed here for about 2 minutes before deciding we were boring and wandering off. It was beautiful!!
Next up, we drove along a path and encountered a giraffe about 20 feet ahead of us on the road. We slowly drove up to him and he slowly kept walking on down the road. He probably walked/galloped ahead of us on the path like that for about 5 minutes. It was so fun to spend time with him! We named him Jerry the Giraffe :).
Then along the way we encountered two elephants play fighting, testing each other's strength. It was so interesting watching them lock their tusks and hit each other with their powerful trunks!
For the rests of the morning, we saw a few lions (who had just eaten), zebras, and more giraffes, impalas/gazelles, and elephants. We also got quite muddy as Moses wasn't one to stay on the designated pathways...And there was quite a lot of mud in our completely open jeep (picture a Jeep Wrangler without the sides and top, just bigger.) And so we drove. A lot. And searched for leopards. And after 4 hours at the park, we saw 0 leopards.
It was quite a frustrating experience, especially after all the wonderful things we'd heard about the prevalence of leopards at the park. Honestly, it was probably the worst game drive we had been on. (Which was more than disappointing since it was also the one we had paid extra money for.) We headed back to the camp a little bummed (at least on my part) and hoping our afternoon drive would be better.
From 10-4 we hung out, "swimming" (Jess) in the "pool" (kind of a pool looking structure about 10 feet in diameter), having a few drinks at the bar (Jon), checking in with family on the "internet" (Jess), eating lunch (pasta with meat sauce), relaxing, showering, and getting ready for our next drive.
Moses arrived at 4 pm to take us on our final game drive (and our first and only night game drive). Jackie wasn't feeling well so she decided to stay in, and Jodi also opted to stay at the camp for a bit of alone time (which I can understand!) Before we even got to the main road from camp we encountered a big heard of giraffes :). Moses was quite happy as they are his favorites. Once we got to the main road we picked up Henry, who Moses told us was going to help us spot animals once the sun went down.
We were all pretty on edge from the beginning about seeing leopards. We basically had one track minds. However, we were also just excited to take in all the sights for our last drive. Once we entered the park and crossed over the bridge, we saw a crocodile, fully out of water! It was the first time we'd seen a croc out of water our whole trip! Moses said he must be preparing to hunt. As we watched him, he walked into a shallow pool to await his prey.
After that we started to drive around, seeing MANY different species of birds (especially weavers and starlings (both my favorites!), storks, vultures, and guinea fowl), and gazelles, impalas, and giraffes. While searching for leopards, we saw two DIFFERENT elephants fighting (maybe mating season is around the corner and they are getting ready??) before Moses got a phone call. And then we were OFF.
Moses drove like a bat out of hell - weaving, twisting, turning - we were all over the road and PUMPED about it. It must be a leopard!
But the thing was - he wouldn't TELL us what it was. He just kept driving like a mad man. Until we saw another truck. And then the most awesome sight: a pack of wild dogs!!
While we had been complaining about the lack of leopard sightings, wild dogs are an EXTREMELY rare sight. They travel in packs and are ALWAYS on the move, only staying in one place to eat before moving on (side note: wild dogs have one of the highest kill success rates of any animal - they successfully kill about 80% of what they attack (compare that to lions at about 10%!!) In addition, they are currently endangered, so pack numbers are dwindling. For those reasons Moses didn't want to tell us what we were about to see in case we missed them and he couldn't find them after racing to their location.
The zebras all clustered together in the middle of the dogs to drive them off - and it worked! The dogs ran ahead of the zebras and the zebra pack stood their ground to show that they were united. The pack, who were still hungry, moved around the zebras and then began looking for other prey to stalk. We swiveled around different roads, looking to cut them off at the next major road they crossed. And then we saw them, chasing down an impala! MAN impalas can run fast!! The dogs took off after it and we watched until the impala ran into a growth of trees and we lost it. After trying to pick up a trace of the dogs again, we finally spotted them by following the path of the vultures that had begun flying overhead! We think half the pack had chased the one impala while the other had stalked other prey and taken it down. After somehow learning that they'd made a kill, the other wild dogs came out of the clearing and went off to find the fresh meat. The animal kingdom is INCREDIBLE.
Needless to say after that we were STOKED. Earlier, Jon had been talking to some of the people in the truck saying that, given the option between seeing more leopards (since we'd already seen two on previous game drives) and wild dogs, he'd rather see the wild dogs. He was beyond excited about the whole thing (as were we all!)
So now, fully amped up, we set off again in search of leopards. We drove around for probably about 5 minutes before we saw the CRAZIEST thing we've seen on safari so far... a fully grown male impala with its hind legs trapped in the jaws of a crocodile!!! WHAAAAATTTTT????? (Sorry, no pictures - I was in shock.)
Honestly, it was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. I started tearing up hoping that the croc would spare the impala but I couldn't see how it would be possible. The impala was breathing heavily, clearly in pain and bleeding out. For so long we had been hoping to see a kill, but it was seriously awful to watch. It's one thing if a lion can take a swipe at a gazelle and kill it cleanly. It's another to die a slow painful death, with a croc basically waiting until you bleed out.
Our guide told us not only is it rare to see a croc attacking an impala that isn't basically dead already (having been taken down by another animal), but also that the croc was REALLY far out of the water - like up the bank of the river, across the driving road, and then another 5 feet off the road - probably a total of about 25-30 feet out of the water...definitely not close enough for the croc to drag the fully grown impala into the water to drown it.
So we sat entranced watching (ok I only half watched, I could barely stand the sight of it) the croc with the impala in its mouth until we saw... a wild dog come out of the trees...and stand watching the croc and impala struggling. The wild dog slowly started to creep closer. The croc opened its jaws just a little to readjust its grip on the impala. The wild dog got closer...and closer...and closer... until the croc opened its jaws and let the impala go!!!!!!!!
Everything in the next paragraph happened in about the span of 15 seconds:
The impala immediately stood up and took off with the wild dog chasing it down the road! Meanwhile, the croc came running RIGHT behind our truck (it was about 5 feet from my side of the truck and all I could think was "ARE AFRICAN CROCS THE ONES THAT CAN JUMP!?!?!???") before it scurried off into the river (where we saw one of his MUCH larger buddies had been waiting on the banks for his dinner...and seemed quite pissed his friend came back empty handed!) Both crocs sidled into the water. Meanwhile, the wild dog continued chasing the impala and our car took off after to watch the hunt. We drove about 100 yards before Jon said, "Something just splashed in the water." When we looked, we couldn't see what it was. We then saw the wild dog coming back towards our car, looking rather confused. It ran up and down the river, but seemed to have lost the impala. We drove back to the part of the river where Jon had seen the splash, trying to figure out what had happened. And then our guide saw it - antlers sticking out of the water! The impala had jumped into the water to escape the wild dog! It has chosen death by drowning/crocodile to death by wild dog!!
We sat in stunned silence for a few minutes, watching the antlers. Then we cracked open a few beers (they came with the night game drive and MAN were they necessary).
We watched the antlers for probably about 2-3 minutes...and they began to move! The impala was still alive, seemingly struggling to get out of the water!! It's head even appeared above the water at one point and then went back down again!! We couldn't believe it! After watching them for another 5 minutes, we decided it was time to move on from the impala (and I think we'd all like to imagine that it somehow made its way to shore...instead of the other, more likely scenarios...). We had seen SO MUCH at that site, but we really didn't feel the need to watch it struggle any more.
There were honestly no words for everything we had seen in the span of 30 minutes. It was truly incredible (and sad) to see the animal kingdom at work.
While all of this had been happening, the sun had been setting. We left the impala almost in the dark to continue our search for the elusive cat. Henry pulled out a huge searchlight and slowly began scanning the horizon for animals. After looking for leopards for nearly 7 hours at this point, it took Henry all of FIVE MINUTES to find us a leopard! Not only did he find us a leopard, he found us a leopard, hiding underneath trees and brush, about 300 yards from our location. THAT is talent! Using the searchlight he had caught the glint in her eyes, and we drove towards her direction on the main road. After waiting for a few trucks to pass us, we then offroaded (we waited for the trucks to pass since it's not exactly legal to offroad and drivers can get huge fines...), straight to the trees she was sitting under. And came within about 20 yards of her. She was STUNNING.
(Again - sorry for the lack of pictures, but when it's pitch black and all you have is a searchlight, there isn't much to see on an iPhone camera!)
We watched her for a while before she stalked off back into the trees and we continued our search for more big cats.
We drove and drove, spotting giraffes, elephants, impalas, gazelles, mongooses, rabbits (who knew there were rabbits in these places??), and bush babies, until we saw another truck's searchlight up in a tree. We drove to the tree (a HUGE Baobab tree that stretched probably 70 feet in the air) and saw a beautiful baby leopard (about 18 months old), located about 30-40 feet in the tree, which Moses told us was probably waiting for its mother to bring back food from a hunt. In looking at this tree, we could NOT for the life of us fathom how this leopard had gotten up there! The top of the tree certainly branched out a lot and would be easy to climb around, but the first branches from the ground were located about 20 feet in the air! Just crazy!
The leopard was hanging out in the tree, relaxing, and peeking her head in and out of the tree's branches. We watched her for several minutes as she moved from branch to branch, and then repositioned our truck under a different part of a tree. At this point, the other truck had left and we were the only ones watching her, as she stood up and got very still on one of the larger branches. She looked just like a statue. And Moses told us she was getting ready to hunt!! Sure enough, Henry moved the spotlight about 10 feet in front of her and saw two guinea fowl sitting on the branch asleep!
We proceeded to cut out our searchlight to allow the leopard to hunt in peace. So we sat and waited. And waited. And waited. After a few minutes, Henry would put the light back on, and we'd see that she'd gotten a foot or two closer to her prey. We shut the light again and a few minutes later noticed the same thing. While we wanted to stay and watch the hunt, we also didn't want to disturb the leopard's hunt, so we decided it was time to head back.
After 4 of the most incredible hours, we dropped Henry off in town and headed back to camp. The whole way back, Moses was telling us just how lucky we were to see what we had seen. How wild dogs are EXTREMELY rare (honestly even HE was elated to see the pack - he looked just as thrilled as we were!), as is seeing a croc hunt, and that he had never seen anything quite like the standoff between the wild dog and the croc! When we got back to camp, Calisto said the same thing. In all the game drives he's been on in his life - he's only come across wild dogs THREE times (and after 8 years as a driver/tour guide he's never had a tour group encounter them either!) Even he was jealous to hear what we had seen (especially since he had decided at the last minute he wasn't going to join us on our game drive.)
I really can't lie, after this morning's game drive I was SUPER disappointed. I'd had such high expectations (probably way too high), and really just wanted a leopard sighting. But WOW did our last game drive make up for it! We could NOT have asked for a more amazing last game drive if we had dreamed it up on our own. We are so grateful for all the things we saw and did while on Safari, and are looking forward (in a few years) to returning to Africa to see even more incredible sights!
Jess' and Jon's highlight of the day: the wild dogs (and more specifically, the standoff between the wild dogs and the zebras)
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