We spent five nights in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). Each day was filled with a similar routine, the game drive. Rise before dawn for an early morning drive, take a midday break for lunch and a few chores or reading and then head out for an evening game drive.
The primary activity of any safari is the game drive. This is normally undertaken in the early hours of the day or the late afternoon, when animals are most active and you have the best chance of seeing game, and hopefully predators on the hunt. Occasionally we talk ourselves into maximizing game viewing with an all day game drive, but after the day heats up, the wind dies and the game becomes sedate while conserving energy in the heat of the sun this usually results in road weariness and some “Why are we doing this?” irritability sometime after lunch.
In the CKGR game is more sparse than in other parks, but so are people and so though sightings are less frequent they are often made alone. This makes each sighting something to savor and quite special.
For us we try, and emphasis on try, to be on the road before sunrise. Sunrise now is about 0640, so we’ve been aiming, without success, to get on the road about 0615. But usually we’re not too far after this.
Jenny does not like to get up in the morning, and it becomes a tug of war between our very cozy tent and her bladder. When it is dark and cold outside it is doubly hard to coax her out of the tent. But the potential of sighting lions and other wildlife is much better in the early morning. So usually I get up and start the kettle, and when I am making tea or coffee Jenny gets up and and on her way out of the tent prepares it for folding up.
One positive of the roof top tent is that you don’t need to take all the bedding out when you put it away, but of course you do need to fold it up every time you drive off, and so our bedding must be folded just so to make the tent collapse and fold cleanly. About a half hour after I get up we’ll have the tent packaged up, coffee and tea made and have the land cruiser started and we’ll be shortly on our way.
Then the drive begins. And a game drive is sort of an odd exercise in fatalism, luck and vigilance. Of course we have no idea where the wildlife might be, and inevitably you must pick almost immediately from leaving your campsite, left or right? North or South? One direction could be a cheetah kill, the other maybe just a lazy kudu munching grass in the distance, and you have no idea when you make your choice. If you arrive at a pan or a water hole should you wait to see what shows up, or should you keep going? We must surrender yourself to chance, we just don’t get to know, But of course everyone else is in the same predicament, and in a relatively empty park like this it means that often when passing one of the half dozen cars you see in a day that you’ll each slow and roll down your window and chat about what you have seen, or haven’t.
We found that on more than one occasion we were giving tips to professional safari guides on where we had sighted predators, when normally they would have the home court advantage. But with such a large park (over 50,000 sq km) even the pros have to cast around to find game to make their clients happy.
Over those days we saw the usual suspects, drought resistant oryx (gemsbok), springbok, black backed jackal, bat eared foxes, large herds of giraffe (25 in one group), hartebeest, wildebeest and ostrich. A few kudu, some small “boks” (klipsringer, dik dik, steenbok? I don’t know how to tell them apart). A lone warthog. Numerous birds of prey, as well as the usual kori bustards and secretary birds.
Predators are all over the CKGR, but still their territory is wide and sightings are not guaranteed. On the first full day we had no cat sightings, though there was a report of a cheetah two camp sights away that came to investigate their site for 20 minutes or so.
On the second day we saw two cheetah hunting giraffe, much larger prey than they would normally go after, but there was a calf (foal?) with them, so perhaps the two of them would go after it? In that case an annoying safari guide got too close and ruined the hunt.
The next day we saw three cheetah, but from very far away. After a failed hunting attempt on some oryx we were able to watch them from a great distance, but they never came close to the road. This is also a inevitability of game driving, the action may not be accessible to you. Offroad driving is not permitted, so you must stick to the two spoor tracks. And of course the cheetah, or whomever, do not always have the courtesy to hunt by the road. But the roads are through the pans, and the pans are where the prey species are, so it is not as improbable as it may sound.
Later that same day we came across a pride of 10 lions in the last hour of daylight and it was magnificent to watch them making their way across the pan. With all the eagle eyed spotting and searching we practice none of that was required for this sighting, Jenny just said “Lions” and there they were, less than 100 meters off the road. We watch them till sunset, and when we left them, in the usual way of any cat, they had plopped down for a break with no apparent haste to get on to anything else.
On the morning of our last full day in the CKGR our alarm went off at 5:30 AM to wake us for our regular early morning drive. Just a minute later we heard a lion’s roar. It’s hard to say how far, we’re certainly not veterans of the bush and sound carries well in the silence, but it seemed much louder than what we heard on the first night. Later we read in our guidebook that the call of a lion can carry five miles, but this one seemed much much closer.
In the moment hearing the roar of a lion was certainly a fast way to wake up. Instantly our senses were heightened, straining to hear another roar. We were no longer at our customary position at the top of the food chain, and it was exciting to think that we might find lions at first light, or even they might walk through our camp while we were in the tent.
We heard them again, closer again this time, and were now unsure what to do. It was loud, they were close, and it certainly imprudent to proceed with our customary routine of getting up and making coffee and tea and folding up to tent. So we waited.
It was curious, the anticipation and uncertainty of wondering just where such a powerful animal was in proximity to us. Our pulses picked up a bit, we became quiet, hyper aware of every noise and movement, and there was a sense of anticipation and uncertainty and a tiny bit of fear. I have read many accounts of time spent in the wild in Africa, stories of camps in the bush and lions in their midst, but what no one has mentioned is how this feeling is similar to arousal. There is the same wondering of what will happen next, the heightened awareness and excitement and anticipation. Leaving the tent seemed unwise, and unburdened of the need to get up so early we followed our, uh, instincts, and waited for the next roar.
Not long after we heard the lion again, this time closer still, but looking out in the low light we couldn’t see anything. We congratulated ourselves on not trying to break camp earlier and waited again. At about 6:20 the lion’s call faded a bit and we decided to break camp as fast as possible.
In less than 10 minutes the tent was stowed and we were in the safety of the vehicle and on the road, looking for a morning lion sighting. We found tracks on the road, less than a 100 yards from our camp.
Conveniently the lion had walked in the road and left tracks that even our modest tracking skills could read, so we followed him west about 5 kilometers, periodically stopping to check the tracks and in the end found a large lone male sleeping in the road. So I guess we didn’t really need our superior tracking skills in the end, but it was really great to see who was responsible for what we had heard in camp.
He ended up not being very active, moving from the sun in the road to the shade of a bush, but we were every close and all alone with the lion.
It was a great start to the day, and we proceeded to drive a long circuit through the park to our final camp, Sunday No. 3, at Sunday Pan. The park from west of our Letiahau camp to the Passarge watering hole didn’t seem as interesting to to us, but the Passarge Valley was amazing. In the future we hope to camp closer so we can experience the Passarge area in the early morning or late evening, but for the time being we were satisfied with our drive to see what the park had to offer.
We did see some people flaunting the rules, camping in undesignated spaces, driving off road and harassing animals, and camping in sites without reservations. We really hope that this sort of behavior doesn’t ruin things for others in the long term. We didn’t see a single park ranger or staff member in six days in the park and there is minimal infrastructure. This is how we prefer it, but certainly the only way a park can survive like this is if individuals act responsibly so as to not spoil it for all.
In the end we were very impressed with the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and look forward to coming back. It is spectacularly isolated and remote, and with the lack of crowds and having wildlife that feels truly wild we were deeply impressed with our visit.
