First of all, a game drive is not using a vehicle to drive or herd game. It is riding in a vehicle to look at animals. Basically we ride around until someone spots something. The guides occasionally get tips from other guides about exciting sightings. They also watch out for tracks in the road and listen for alarm calls from squirrels, birds, impala and the like. And they watch animals for alarm activity – if a herd of impala is frozen and looking in the same direction, then there is probably a predator hiding there.
Riding in a game drive truck is definitely not a passive activity. We don’t just go tootling down the road. The roads are very rutted and rough, sometimes with large holes made by the elephants, and we sit high up, so we’re thrown from side to side and front to back and tossed up and down. (Many times I felt like I was in one of those twisty roller coasters that smash you in all directions.) Sometimes we have to drive through water that comes up to the top of the wheels. All this with a camera and binoculars tugging at my neck and banging against me, and my “girls” bouncing up and down (not always a comfortable thing), and my head swiveling from side to side to look for wildlife.Oh, and there is very little room between the rows of seats so my knees are jammed into the back of the seats in front. For two or more hours at a time. We break for tea at 10 AM (a little tea picnic out in the bush) and for cocktails (sun downers) at sunset. Morning drives are 3-4 hours long; afternoon drives are 2-3 hours. And climbing in and out is not easy.
But then again, there we are slowly driving down one dirt track or another, swatting at an occasional fly, bouncing up and down and smashing side to side into each other, looking at nothing but hot, dry, flat land and mostly bare trees and we haven’t seen anything interesting for 30 minutes and then all of a sudden behind that green bush over there a head pops up and there is a huge giraffe (how could I have not seen him before?). Oh but wait – there’s another one just behind it, and now that my eyes have adjusted for a giraffe shape I can see the legs of another two behind that bush over there, and oh, there’s a young one. And that grey rock behind that tree just moved and it’s an elephant – oh wait, it a herd of elephants. And then a wondrously beautiful bird, the lilac breasted roller, flies out of a tree and loops around the car to show off his beautiful colors and then flies off and a bunch of guinea fowl with their blue, blue heads dash out from under the scrub. And the wonder of seeing the animals and the exhilaration of the discovery erases all the discomfort.
Yes, we may be sitting, but we’re all tired and dusty when we pull back into camp. We are usually met upon return to camp or the lodge by someone handing out cool, damp facecloths and a glass of juice. It is heaven.
One of the interesting aspects of game drives is that it is possible to get quite close to the animals when in a big Land Rover (well, at least as long as we don’t stand up or make loud noises). This is because the animals see the truck as one large object that does not fit the profile of their usual predators or prey. If any of us got out of the truck then it is a different story entirely and very dangerous. At that point, we would turn into prey if we were near a predator, and if we were near prey animals, they would assume we were predators. We are not in a cute Disneyesque wild animal park where the animals are tame or semi-tame or not even real. This is the real thing. On the other hand, throughout the entire trip, I often had a thought hovering in the back of my mind about how could what I was seeing be real? The environment is so startlingly different from my home environment and past experiences in places like Disney’s Wild Animal Park and the San Diego Zoo tend to lull a person into thinking that a game drive in Africa is just another theme park ride. Several times I reminded myself that “this is really Africa.” It most definitely is a different world, almost a different planet, from my industrialized, westernized life. So different, that to really take it all in I had to expand my reality. In a way, a safari is a more experiential trip than a trip to Paris, for example. Yes, I looked at the animals, much as I might look at a cathedral or a painting or a bridge, but I also think it was much less passive than simply looking – the sounds and smells and anticipation of what might happen next and just being in the same space as the animals made this feel quite different and mind-expanding. Well, that’s enough blathering for now.
Your paragraph about spotting animals is PERFECT!
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