Roaming with ‘Big Five’ in Africa
Off-season safari cuts costs of dream honeymoon trip
HLUHLUWE, South Africa – The whole point of spending our honeymoon in the South African bush was to get as close as possible to the animals, especially the wild and possibly dangerous ones.
Within minutes of entering the Phinda Private Game Reserve for our first safari, I learned an important lesson: Elephants need plenty of personal space. Somehow, my wife Joyce had agreed to make a four-day safari part of our honeymoon trip in South Africa. We picked Phinda because of its widely praised conservation efforts and work with the local Zulu community, but mainly because the reserve’s animals can go pretty much anywhere. Phinda has leopard, lion, elephant, rhinoceros and Cape buffalo — the Big Five so important to the touristtrade — and they’re all perfectly free to wander right up to your front door.
The drive from the Durban airport to Phinda began uneventfully, but turned out to be memorable. Between the rolling green hills, I caught glimpses of the Indian Ocean.
Then our driver turned onto a dirt road and stopped to ask for directions. His “shortcut” put us through a back entrance to Phinda, one guarded by the region’s anti-poaching unit. The guard told us to wait for an armed escort, but our driver went ahead on his own, picking up speed until we saw two elephants, the little one the size of a small school bus, the larger bull a good match for a two-storey building.
Our driver paused, then laid on the gas and horn, aiming to pass behind the larger elephant. That seemed like the wrong move, I thought.
The bull saw the oncoming minivan as a challenger and spun to face us. The younger elephant sprinted to our right. Our driver finally hit the brakes, and the bull rocked back, then began its charge. “What do I do?” our driver yelled.
The elephant flared its ears and rumbled closer, on course for a head-on collision. Our driver tried to slam the clutch into reverse and the engine quit. During a long minute, the notion of once-in-a-lifetime trip had an entirely different meaning. For whatever reason, the bull stopped short of the minivan’s hood and shook his head, giving our driver time to reverse and speed backward.
A few wrong turns later, we encountered a ranger, Sam Mdluli. Our driver, still trembling, handed us over.
We were assigned to Mdluli for the rest of the trip, and quickly grew fond of him. Game rangers are a combination of tour guide, older brother and real-life action hero. They wake you up in the morning, answer all your ridiculous questions and steer their Toyota Land Cruisers offroad through bushes and branches with a loaded rifle just above the wheel.
Flying down the road one morning, the vehicle skidded to a stop and Mdluli bounded from his seat and into the tall grass. He walked a few steps, took a deep dramatic breath, and turned to us with a big smile. “Dung!” he said, holding his palms over what turned out to be black rhino dung. “Ah, it’s very fresh. We’re in luck. You’re going to see some black rhino today.”
With Mdluli at the wheel and a tracker perched on the hood, we saw the park’s animals, from the endangered black rhinos to dung beetles, usually at a safe distance. The highlight was watching the big cats. We’d pull up near cheetahs or a lion pride and shut off the engine; then our group would sit in silence, staring and snapping pictures for hours. One afternoon, two cheetah brothers struggled to wake up, passing a good 30 minutes yawning, stretching and wiggling on their backs before finally getting up for a hunt as the sun set. Another morning, a pride of lions sat in the forest pulling apart a wildebeest.
The animals just went about their business. As long as you kept quiet and seated, you were supposedly safe. Phinda’s no-fence policy means it’s possible to stumble into a peaceful nyala antelope chewing on leaves in the daytime or hyenas out looking for food at night. So starting the day means a guy with a pistol walks you to the main lodge for a quick snack before the four-hour morning game drive.
You return to a full breakfast. Lunch was an hour or so later. High tea came next. A four-course dinner followed the afternoon game drive. After the first night, it wasn’t a surprise to enter our cabin, with its swimming pool carved into a cliff, and find the floor covered in lit candles, a steamy bubble bath and a chilled bottle of champagne.
So how did we afford the luxury trip? First, we trimmed at least $140 off our nightly bill by avoiding high season, DecemberMarch, during the Southern hemisphere summer. Prices drop in April.
Still, the trip wouldn’t have been possible without help from family and friends. My wife used an online registry called Traveler’s Joy to describe our honeymoon plans, and the website offered our guests the ability to pick, say, a game drive as a wedding gift. Those gifts paid for more than half the trip and made writing thankyou notes a breeze.