Kalahari Desert, South Africa.
Game Drives at the Tswalu Motse Lodge
It’s winter, August 4th 2016, 19:45, and it’s hard for me to believe so, because it’s August and I am from the Mediterranean where its the other way around. Its 19:45 and pitch dark already. The nights are cold, and during the day there is beautiful warm sunshine with a little wind. Close to freezing at night and around 20C during the day.
I just had one excellent barbecue (prepared by the lodge and cooked by @ftyl) under the stars, and stars my friend I need to tell you, they look incredible, absolutely impossible to describe with words, you just need to experience it. Moon, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and Milky Way, they are all here, but no Big and Small Bear, not on this side of the planet. Tonight we are going to sleep right under them, or at least we are going to try, there is more than enough things to make that possible.
Tswalu has a separate lodge 30 minutes away from the main lodge, with just one open room for you to enjoy all alone in the middle of nature. They call it Molori, “to dream” in seTswana.
It is the first time ever for us to come to South Africa, we skipped the whole city exploring part that we enjoy so much and took off straight to a lodge to do some Safari. The word Safari comes from Swahili, which took it from the Arabic word Safar, meaning journey. Here in Tswalu you feel straight away like you are part of the family and you just want to stay here. It is a completely different world to the one that I know, and I loved it at first sight.
Nature and animals. I have visited different kinds of zoos multiple times before, but you can’t compare it. Free wild life. A day and a half of spending time with the animals and seeing their behaviours, just observing them, getting to know more about them, made me come to the conclusion that we humans are less advanced than we think.
The type of intelligence nature has given these animals over the millennia is impressive and makes our own capabilities seem less special. From the way an ostrich female leader protects her own eggs by inviting the other females to lay eggs around hers, all the way to watching a pride of lions encircle their target on a hunt. It is impressive how thought through everything is.
It seemed almost like the lions were talking together telepathically, first setting up a barrier on one side and after that was done, sending one of them to the back of their target, today a wilderbeast, to make it run right into the trap. This time the strategy failed and the wilderbeast will live to see another day. The lions were visibly disappointed that their 1 hour long preparations did not end up in a lunch feast.
During the whole time big daddy, a Black-Mane Kalahari Desert Lion, was snoozing and waiting to see if the females would get him some food. If they would have succeeded, he would have been the first to eat.
These 2 small examples show us the hierarchy that is present with all the other animals too. During our next game drives and observing other animals this kept on confirmed itself.
What makes all this even more special is two people who you spend the most time with on your Safari: the guide and tracker. The guide is a person who you could compare to a walking animal encyclopaedia with a built in gps navigation. So many different roads but they just slide trough them without any problems. Most of them could also apply for a rally driver, and stuff they do with their cars is beyond me. In their positions I know I would just stop and start crying because I couldn’t get out of some bush or thicket.
Then there is the tracker. This is not a human being, although it looks like that. This person looks everywhere around himself and searches for tracks. For us watching him and observing what he is actually doing, it looks like science fiction and we would send him straight to CSI. He also has a built in gps, is not as chatty as a guide, is more secretive, we can just keep on looking at him and on the paths around you and hope he will reveal some of his secrets.
Let me share with you how exactly one day in Tswalu lodge looks like:
Wake up call at 6:45, after that meeting with our guide, quick coffee and small snacks at 7.00, around 7:15 head to the car and off to the first game drive, around 10:00 we would be back for some brunch and then there is a break until 15:00, in the meantime we would treat ourselves with a massage or just enjoy beautiful surroundings of the lodge, from 15:00 to 19:00 was time for a second game drive and at 19:00 dinner time.
This is pretty much the same way for all the lodges, just with a slight shift depending on sunrise and sunset.
I love to sleep long, but I managed to wake up this early and I surely didn’t regret it! The sunrise is impressive same as their sunset and the day goes by so quickly that at 20:00 you are super ready to go to bed together with chickens.
On the drives we focused on the wildlife more unique to Tswalu. Tswalu is one of the biggest private reserves in South Africa, with 250000 acres it is much bigger than the other reserves we will be visiting. It will take you 6 hours to drive to one of its outer borders from the lodge and all this property is fenced in.
Through the middle goes a national road which splits it in two parts. Luckily, because this way they can keep the big predators away from their rarer species like the lovely black Sable Antelope, Oryx, Red Heartbeast.
Another lovely experience hard to find anywhere else in South Africa are the Meerkats. Tswalu makes sure that a few of the Meerkat Gangs are very used to humans and therefor they are great to watch up close and personal. Like many other animals you see on Safari they have learned over the time and generations that there is nothing to fear from these funny looking smelly creatures called Homo Sapiens.
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