Guest Blog by Noz: Most Incredible Nature Experience EVER

Editor's Note: This blog contains questionable language and may be offensive to some Europeans. I apologize for the lack of photos. Our Internet connection is close to being dial-up and is extremely slow. I will post a lot more when we get back in two days.

Today was the most unbelievable nature experience of me and E's lives.

We are at Jackalberry Lodge on the Thornybush Game Reserve, one of the world's best. Highly recommended. The Drakensberg Mountains (like Grand Canyon, South African-style) sits as the backdrop. It's private, so there are hardly any other lodges or vehicles around. The lodge has only like five chalets/huts, which are amazing. We wake up at 5 am, drink a coffee or tea with rusks (sort-of like biscotti), then take off for four hours of driving and tracking animals. Then we take breakfast, siesta, lunch and then head out around 3:30 pm and track through till nightfall, about 7:30 pm. Then eat a 5-star dinner (usually some beautiful lamb or beef or wild African animal) around a boma (camp fire). Then to bed by 10 pm to do it all over again the next day. Everyday has been a new and incredible tracking day. We have seen lion, ellies (elephants), leopard, cheetah, buffalo, white rhino, black rhino, giraffe, crazy birds, etc. Although its amazing to see these animals from just feet away, we hadn't seen much action. No fights, no mating, no hunting. Mostly just lounging, eating, sleeping. But today--our final full day here--was the day of all days.

Most people think two nights are long enough to see everything, but we are staying four nights. The Italian family that was here earlier thought it was crazy that we would stay so long in one place (they said it in their slightly arrogant, but nice, Italian way). We were woken up by the lodge staff--"Knock-knock--Dank yoouu" in their SA accent. We were still half-asleep, but then we heard a male lion roaring, which really woke us up. He was probably miles away, but their roars travel mad miles across the bush. So cool to wake up to lions and not roosters.

We set out at the break of dawn in the open-top Land Rover (the kind that I always wanted when I was in high school b/c I thought they were so cool) with Van (our driver) and Adam (our bushman guide tracker who sits on an extended seat off the front bumper). We are riding with a family from Paris--parents Brian and Marlena, daughter Victoria (who is a chic French aspiring photographer), and son Oscar. Victoria has a bad-ass Canon with a scope that's about two feet long. I am a bit embarrassed of our Canon Powershot (only really good for Maria Sharapova commercials). I love the French. Soo "joie de vivre". Everything is "magnifique" or "increyible" with them. So much more full of life than the American counterparts. We first run into a family of giraffe eating leaves off tall trees. There were two young babies with the mom and dad giraffe--so cute. We move on. We spot leopard tracks and cheetah tracks. At this point E and I are well-trained to know our tracks. Apparently there is a leopard with two babies, so we started tracking them, but unfortunately after about 30 mins of tracking, we find that there tracks lead into a deep ravine type area, too crazy for even the Land Rover. A little disappointed at this point. E and I are starting to lose a little faith in the tracking abilities of our guides and our mood is sub-par. We are a bit tired (not that we really physically do anything but eat and ride in the jeep), and a bit pessimistic about not seeing cats in action.

We hear there are black rhino several kilometers away. OK, pretty cool. So we go see them. Black rhino are endangered, only about 2,000 left in the world. They are beautiful. But, they just eat and sleep. No action again. Maybe we just won't see anything crazy-exciting while we're here. Maybe the Italians were right. Maybe 4 nights is "Oh, that's crazy" and 2 nights is all we need to see everything there is to see. We move on. There is word that a mother cheetah and her three female youngsters are spotted. I must say it is freakin' hard to find these elusive cats. They don't mind human presence, but trying to find them out here in the bush is crazy-difficult. We tried for hours every day to find these cheetah, but have come up empty-handed.

After several kilometers of driving in excitement and anticipation, we roll up to the area of where they were spotted. We see a decent-sized herd of impala--not really a big deal b/c there are so many around here. Van, our driver/tracker, makes a comment about the impala with a hint of implying that the cheetah may be ready to hunt. At this point, I am excite. I want to somehow herd the impala over to where the cheetah are, but I know I can't mess with nature like that. As we move on past the impala for another kilometer or so, we see the cheetah on a small termite mound/hill. A beautiful mom cheetah with her three young females. Just as we pull up, mom is "mobile." She trots down the hill and through the bush--headed toward the impala. The youngsters wait for awhile and eventually start following her, but well behind her. She is on the hunt! We go off-road and literally follow behind Mom. We see her crouching, stalking quietly toward the impala herd. She spots a young impala.

Then bam! She takes off like Usain Bolt on the juice. She chases the impala, knocks it down once. The impala gets back up and takes off in the other direction. Mom takes off again and after a 40 meter dash, she pounces on the impala, this time for good. She bites down on the impala's jugular and slowly puts it in a sleeper hold. At this point I have crapped my pants. This was a childhood dream come true. Cheetah is pretty much my favorite animal. I used to draw them all the time in 1st through 3rd grade. Maybe I'll start drawing them again in my free time.

Now the mom calls over for her young. A minute later, they come running over. The impala is still barely alive. The mom wants her young to finish the hunt. So the young gals pounce on the impala, and get into the jugular, and then start pulling at it from both ends. They start digging in, and you can just here the meat shredding, the bones breaking, the blood running. We are literally 10-15 feet away. The Japanese in me came out and I was taking pictures and doing Flip video simultaneously while watching and taking it all in. I give high-fives to the Frenchies, who are behind us saying, "ooh que magnifique" "ooh que increyible" and other french phrases that I couldn't get. Victoria has by now taken 500 shots with her crazy Canon. We have about ten due to the Powershot shutter speed. We are trying to become better friends with her so that hopefully we can use our USB later to get her photos. Her's are so much better than ours--not even a comparison. It's like watching grainy TV in our apartment versus watching HD on Naoshi and Debbie's 60" flat screen. Up above there are already 15 vultures circling. Another Land Rover carrying a different lodge's guests are here, so we have to pull out and give them a turn to watch the feasting. (The photo below kinda sucks so small, but if you look close, you can see all four cheetahs. The one on the right is eating the impala.)

It is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a start to finish of a mom cheetah hunting for her kids. I can't describe into words how awesome this was for E and me. We are as satisfied as the momma cheetah now. Our safari trip is complete. If I don't see one more animal on the two remaining game drives we have, I will be cool with that. With our faith restored a million times over in Adam and Van The Man, we take morning tea in an open area over looking the bush and mountains behind, take a leak behind a bush, then make our way back to the lodge. (E's too scared to pee in the bush, and has been getting mad at me about how it's unfair that girls can't do it like guys can. Then Marlena has no qualms and goes behind a bush to drop her draws. I love it. She don't give a F. Joie de vivre. She just saw a cheetah killing an impala. That's getting back to nature.)

We will never forget this day. We lived an episode in Planet Earth, Nat-Geo-style. Can't beat that, son.