Battle at Kruger

Okay so we did not see anything as cool as that video, but we did see some pretty neat stuff. The adventure started on our drive. We left Mbabane just as the evening downpour was beginning. We continued to have rain most of the way although it let up a bit. By the time we reached the Swazi border it was dusk and we found that the power at the border crossing station was out. Silly me for a second worried that they would turn us away given you could barely see anything in the station. Instead he kind of held our passports up in the air like he could possibly make something out and stamped them sending us on our way across to South Africa. So we hop back in the car, drive a few meters down the road to the South African side where not only do they have electricity, but also working computers.

After successfully crossing the border, we are minding our own business driving down the road when we come across a large tree that has fallen across both lanes of traffic so obviously we stop the car. There is a large bus (actually a double bus with one of those accordion connectors) coming the other way so we decide to let him try to go around the tree first. He starts to try to drive around the tree on the shoulder, but does not make it. The bus ends up stuck leaning sideways on the shoulder bent in the middle at the accordion connection. We really thought the bus was going over for a second, but luckily all the people managed to get off safely. Now picture, four ex-pat females in the dark in a Toyota corolla with a large tree blocking the road, a bus stuck leaning sideways on the shoulder and a hundred people gathered on the road some with beer. We were really torn between wanting to get pictures of this ridiculous situation and not wanting to draw any more attention to ourselves than we were just by being there. As we were sitting in the car trying to figure out what to do because we obviously could not go forward, but we there also wasn't much reason for us to go back becasue the border closes at 8 pm we hear a large snap. We look up to see the passengers from the bus dangling from the large limbs of the tree branch to break them. They continued to do this for a while throwing them to the side of the road. Eventually, a group of men push the remaining tree to the side of the road and we are on our way again like nothing ever happened. We finally made it to the town we were staying in only to be greeted by another downpour that was flooding the roads. We had to stop a few times debating how deep the water in the road was and whether we would be able to make ti through. Luckily we finally made it safely to our lodging for the night.

The remainder of the trip continued to have amusing little events occur, but mainly involved game viewing. I saw my first (and second) male lion. We failed to see a leopard though, which is now my safari goal.
What you might ask is the lion watching? He is watching the stupid humans who in the excitement to see the lion, have gotten their safari vehicle stuck in a ditch. Not a whole lot you can do to correct this, when you have a lion lying meters away just staring at you. Eventually he did get bored of the stupid human antics, the guards got out with their guns, the people filed off the truck and the truck was able to get out of the ditch. There seemed to be a "vehicles getting stuck on the side of roads" theme to our weekend.

Ah, crap...big animal heading straight for our little car.

Baby Babar while his mother was still around.

This mama monkey came right up and stood up in front of our car. I could not believe she would expose her obviously newborn baby like that.

Our return trip was thankfully less eventful. Only amusing event, was at the final gate to drive our car into swaziland. The gentleman asked us to pop our trunk. He then proceeded to ask, "what's this?" Souvenirs. "What's this?" shoes. "What's this?" beer. "the old man (pointing at the man who would open the gate) likes beer. He needs a beer. He likes beer". Yes, we gave into the bribe and gave the old man a bottle of beer.