Fetter's Travels: Kuzuko Safari #3 & #4

Jan. 7, 2014

For our third safari we went in search of the cheetahs and the black rhino. I really wanted to see the cheetah, and Noah really wanted to see the rhino. The black rhino are much more aggressive and harder to find than the white ones, like the one we saw at Buffelsdrift that was out in the open. They have a special section of the park where they keep all of the cheetahs, so they can usually find them relatively easily, but unfortunately, we didn't see any. That is the way it is with safaris, sometimes you see lots of animals, and sometimes you don't. We did see another male bull elephant though.

The fourth and final safari had us among the elephant herd. The 2 male elephants that we saw on our previous safaris were by themselves, but today we found all of the females and young elephants. I think we counted at least 30 elephants at one point. The highlight of the drive though was when our driver parked about 10 m up from the dry river bed that the elephants were following, and several elephants walked right in front of the Jeep. Then a whole line of 10 elephants came out of the bush behind us about 5 m away. We were surrounded by wild elephants!! Noah and I were in the back seat of the Jeep, so we had front row seats. It was amazing, and a bit scary to be that close to the wild elephants. Unfortunately, I had the camera zoomed in to get pictures when they were farther away, and I fumbled with the camera to try to adjust it to movie mode to get it on film, so I only got a bit of footage of the elephants going by. The younger elephants were a little surprised to see our Jeep there, but otherwise they just kept sauntering along in search of more food. What an awesome experience!