I’ve been on holiday as previously posted, in Paris, but just prior to going there, I had the fantastic opportunity to visit South Africa.  People say to me, so what happened, did you go on Safari.  Well as a matter of fact, I did do what is commonly called a game drive.  Game Drive’s are fairly structured experiences, where you go lodge at a game park, IMPODIMO was the one I stayed at with a group of associates as a kind of wind down from a pretty hectic promotional event at Sun City earlier in the week.

The Game Drive takes place either early morning or early evening, and in this particular case, we set out after a late lunch and decided to go looking for lions.  Our party was not there to shoot anything but photographs, and I have to admit my professional photographic equipment consisted of a flip camcorder and a black and white film camera.  I think I filled up the roll of 24 black and whites the day before on my olympus mu 35mm snap camera and so was down to using a hand held flip HD camera to record the experience.

We really had a fantastic guide and tracker on our truck.  The truck was a landrover and purpose built for the kind of bush bashing they do out on the game parks in South Africa…. but on with the story.

In our case we were looking for lions.  We really hadn’t seen any so far.  I had seen a bunch of jackals trying to climb a tree to get an eagle, which to my mind was the picture of futile endeavour.  Perhaps the jackals had a bet with each other, it was like that… but back to the story…

Yes lions were the go, our driver guide and tracker were pretty sure they knew roughly where the lions were… on the far side of the park.  To get there we had to drive for an hour i guess to the North East edge.  Our normally sedate type of driving was interrupted by a big bull elephant, who seemed intent on:-

a. Not letting us get to see his herd of 50 or so female elephants

b. Frustrated with not being able to get with any of them himself

c. Other elephant things I could not figure out

So after a game of cat and mouse with the elephant, it decided to chase us off the road and into the bush, where our intrepid driver and tracker carefully outsmarted said large black bull elephant by playing a decoy-waiting game.

So this is about how close the elephant got to the truck before we high tailed it out to the bush on the other side of the road, still in full sight of the elephant.

I could write more on this post about the strategy by which we were able to outsmart it, and the fact that eventually we did get to drive through or past the herd of 50 female elephants, but that is another story…

I could write about how we caught up with the lions and how we took sundown photos of them, and how just when we were all settled down, same said male elephant came trundling through the darkness and scared off all the lions at a frightening pace, as well as our mates in trucks..but that is another story..