WHERE WILL YOU FIND THE BEST SAFARI?

In choosing between East Africa and South Africa for your next safari, there are several important differences in the safari experience. In Kenya and Tanzania, you travel across large plains without any roads and often see large groups of animals together. There may be a lot of safari vehicles around in the same area, especially if a guide finds one of the Big Five and alerts the others.

The South Africa experience differs in the way you see the animals. The landscape is full of bushes, trees, high grass, and hills, so you are not able to look off into the distance and see wildlife. There are a number of private game reserves, so you are usually in a safari vehicle with no other vehicles around. You travel on dirt trails and suddenly encounter animals crossing your dirt path or appearing close beside you.

Our many exciting experiences included discovering a lion napping at the side of the road, a hippo sleeping in the middle of the dirt road, and a family of elephants, including a very young one, walking so close to our vehicle that we could have reached out and touched them.

The guides do not have guns or other weapons, so it is very important for them to recognize if these large animals are showing any signs of perceived danger and aggressiveness that would cause them to suddenly turn and attack.

We also saw two instances of nature in the raw. A cheetah had killed a gazelle and then pulled the body up into a tree for safekeeping, while he rested from his exertions in the high grass below.

The second vivid example of survival of the fittest involved a Cape buffalo that the trackers had seen some lions stalking the previous day and knew that it had been killed. Our vehicle was able to penetrate the heavy brush where the lions had taken the buffalo. The ones that had already eaten their fill were lying languidly nearby, while a couple of the unfed were ravaging the buffalo carcass and what was apparently a baby buffalo. It was unclear whether the mother had died trying to protect her baby or whether it had not been born yet.

In addition to the large private game reserves, nearby Kruger Park offers public access and paved roads for observing the animals. When you are zipping along a paved a paved road, you do not get the same feel of being part of the wild environment, but we saw a lot of animals here too. As there are no fences to prevent the animals from roaming freely, they pass from one area to another.

Although the safari experience is certainly worth the trip, a visit to South Africa would not be complete without seeing cosmopolitan Cape Town, Nelson Mandela’s Johannesburg, and nearby Victoria Falls in Zambia.

What kind of safari would you choose if you could go wherever you wanted to see wild animals?