During a game tour through the park one is strictly forbidden from leaving the Safari Vehicle. When a small child needed an emergency bathroom stop, our guide stood guard with a pistol while lookouts scanned for predators. So why is it that the golf course in the middle of the park is unfenced, and there are instructions on what to do if an animal attacks?
It's only a 9-hole course, wrapped around Lake Panic. No one would tell me why they call it that. It's winter here, so not much grass to speak of, but some interesting residents in the water hazards and a spectacular assortment of birds.
It's the hippos that attact the most attention, with good reason. They are wallowing in the lake close to the second green. The sound of a hippo leaving the mud gives new meaning to the phrase giant sucking sound, and you don't want to be anywhere nearby when it happens. It definitely hurt my concentration while putting and I spent a certain amount of time looking over my shoulder on the subsequent holes.
A family of wart hogs digs up the turf but mostly they stay off the greens.
Impala make themselves at home on the fairway. They are like a flock of highschool girls, skittish, graceful, and sleek. They can jump 10 feet high, which I suppose breaks the correspondence with adolescent human females.
There's an area near the water surrounded by electric fencing, it's to keep the elephants away from the fever trees, which the elephants like to knock down so they can eat the roots. There are about 5000 too many elephants in the park, more than the ecosystem can sustain. The plan is to thin the herd and set up a processing plant to feed elephant meat to the poorer locals, but the Greens are up in arms. No one is sure what to do with all the ivory, which is currently banned on the world market. Seems stupid to waste it but no one wants to encourage poaching.
As I'm getting ready to putt on the 7th hole I notice some odd divots in the green. They're in groups of four, each group in a semicricle about a foot wide. It takes a minute to put it together but then the hippo tracks leading back to the lake are unmistakable.
At a souvenir stand on the drive back to Johannesburg, the heavyset black woman in more or less traditional garb is displaying the table full of jewelry for sale. She points to a necklace, says "Eepo bone" to tell me it's made of hippo bone. She points to some earrings, same thing. Shows me another bracelet, and again: "eepo bone". So I point below my belt and say it with a big smile: "eepo bone". All the ladies in the market were still laughing when I left several minutes later.
Photos from other travels