Schotia
Posted: 2/7/2005 11:00 PM (Permalink)
Our trip to Addo lasted only to mid-afternoon because we went to another park in the evening. Schotia is a private game park as opposed to the state run Addo. What this means is that instead of driving around yourself, you get driven around on some sort of 4X4 vehicle by a guide or ranger. There is also a greater emphasis on the safari experience. At Schotia, for instance, our guide took us around for a while then we stopped at a lata, which is a traditional open air structure, for tea. Then some more animal viewing and back to the lata for a chuckwagon style meal. It’s really quite enjoyable.
Enough talk though. Let’ get to some pictures. Schotia, our guide informed us, is divided up into to section. The “friendly section” and the “lions section.” We started out in the former. This is what the friendly section looks like.
Happy zebra grazing here...
...peaceful giraffe eating there. Here’s a little African Jackal that walked in front of us for some time.
Cute little doggie!
But then (after tea), queue up the ominous music. For it was time to head to the dangerous lion section. We drove through a double gated, high fenced enclosure and started searching. Our guide told us that they had three males, one dominant and two juveniles, and a female with two cubs. After about 10 minutes of driving around, we found them. King of the beasts!
Vicious, snarling animals, ready to kill at a moment’s notice.
Hmmm...The brochures show a bunch of lions working over a fresh kill with a Range Rover full of amazed tourists looking on. But, this is what you get on a 90 degree sunny day. Lions spend something like 20 hours a day sleeping, much like their domesticated cousins (I’m looking at you, Eliot). They are beautiful creatures though. Here’s the dominant male holding court.
Our guide brought us up to within 50 feet or so of the three males all sleeping together. They definitely knew we were there watching, but they didn’t seem to care about us very much. At one point, someone on our Range Rover sneezed and they all perked up for just a few seconds, but then they went back to sleep.
Schotia is a “free range” park which means that there are enough animals running around in their little enclosure for them to hunt their own food. They especially like to eat the little baby boks. An interesting thing I learned was that lions almost never drink. They get all their liquid refreshment from the animals they eat.
Schotia actually offers a “sleep with the lions” safari. Up to 4 people go into the lion section (with an armed guide) and spend the night (perhaps “sleep” is the wrong word to use) in a tent that is pitched inside a bush. The bush is not a fence and provides only a little cover. It sounded like kind of a fun trip.
On the way back to the lata and dinner, we went by the rangers’ quarters to see their pet rhino.
See all those tracks where the grass is shaved down? That is a rhino lawnmower there. We spent about 10 minutes just watching this guy mow down the grass. He spends his days sitting in the water hole and the evenings eating grass.
After dinner, our guide drove us back in the dark. The animals tend to be more active and closer at night, so they had search lights on the Range Rover.
I have to admit, I was more interested in getting my first good look at the Southern Hemisphere stars. It was a beautifully clear night. In the Southern Hemisphere, there are a few constellations that we see here (Orion, for example) , but they appear in the north instead of the south and they are upside down. I was most excited that I got to see the two Magellanic Clouds. These are two satellite galaxies to our Milky Way. They only appear in the south.