Sunday, July 5, 2009

Day 12 - Sunday, June 5th - Hluhluwe

So, Sunday dawned dark and early. We were up around 5:30 to catch our 6:00 game drive, which meant we started out on the drive in full dark. At first this meant a pretty uneventful drive, but we did manage to see two spotted hyenas, so I'm sure not complaining. They're relatively rare.

Once it lightened up and we were able to see by more than headlights we saw a bit more. Lots of herbivores, like the day before. Elephants at a distance, rhinos pretty close (though behind some photo-ruining foliage), giraffes by the dozen. Even a few baby zebras! There were also some of the stranger animals like nyalas that nobody really knows about (basically, larger impala types). The real feature of the drive ended up being birds. We saw a wide variety of bush chickens and hawk type birds and the like. I wish beyond anything else that I'd had binoculars.

After the drive we threw in some laundry and grabbed a quick (but delicious) lunch out on the restaurant's patio, bought some more souvenirs, finished our laundry, and it was time to leave. Laundry sounds pretty boring, but the time it took to do that meant that we were hanging around our huts to see the little reddish deer thing that came up to graze outside them and tons of monkeys! I got some fantastic up-close pictures of monkeys. Vervets, I believe they were.

After this we started driving home, taking the long way through Umfolozi, which is the other half of the park. I think we saw some wildebeest and baboons, but I napped. It ended up getting us a little lost and we took a bit longer than expected to get home, but again, I napped. I was pretty much in and out of consciousness the whole way home.

This was mainly because of the fever that I'd been running all day. Granted, we didn't have thermometers to check if I'm right about that, but I know what a fever feels like. It made the game drive a little uncomfortable, but I was gone by the time we made it back to Ingwavuma. I ducked out of planning for camp 2 in order to take some hard core nighttime Tylenol (courtesy of the very generous Marilee) and pass out in my bed at about 5:30.

So it wasn't the best end to the weekend, but overall it was a fantastic trip and a wonderful location and Jessy and I are already planning on having our weddings at Hluhluwe.

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