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St. Lucia & Imfolozi National ParkMar 17, 2008
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Balito Bay to St. Lucia & Imfolozi National Park - March 17
Our Wagomaster offered an option of early departure to enable us to do an unscheduled game drive (self drive Safari) thru Imfolozi, NP - the oldest of South Africa's Game Preserves. Great decision!! It was what I expected a game park to be. Animals everywhere. Thousands of Impala, dozens of Wildebeest, Zebra (literally had to herd them out of the road, giraffe, several herds of buffalo, White and Black Rhino, Nyla, Warthogs, Elephant (had to move to let one cross the road), Monkey, Babboon, and several new birds. The only things we didn't see were the big cats. Animals were so plentiful that we got to the point we would pass up photos of Impala, Wildebeest, Zebra, and Giraffe.
The only downside was the game roads were about 60 kilometers off our route, which left us with a 90 km drive to St. Lucia after we finished the drive. On the road back we encountered hundreds of goats and lots of cows grazing unattended on the roadside, and crossing the road. The days off and on drizzle changed to a steady rain as we arrived at St. Lucia's campground. Hippos (the parks major attraction) apparently didn't want to get wet in the rain so stayed under water until dark. We were told they usually came out of the water a couple of hours before dark to begin their evening feeding.
We had supper at a restaurant with tables overlooking the Hippo area, hoping for a sighting of more than the top 5% of a hippo. The power went out just before dark. We returned to find the campground (the worst we have had to date - on par with a low end Alaska or Mexico park) also without power. It was a planned outage. The ZA utility company, ESCON, is unable to provide sufficient power for the increased loads due to cooler weather. They selectively just cut power to large areas. Somewhat like Bagdad? The worst part: the President of ESCON was given a 13 million Rand bonus (1.8 million US) for saving money by reducing employees. Hedge fund gamblers were delighted - the populace is very angry as the company is not able to produce enough power for current needs, and had threatened to not issue permits for building new structures as they can't provide power for them in the near future.
But, the evenings failures could not dampen the high we had from all the animals in Imfolozi NP.
