Welcome to Africa! This is our first safari adventure of the trip. We hired a local guide to take us to Pilanesberg which is a game preserve about 2-1/2 hours to the northwest of Johannesburg. We spent almost 7 hours driving around in the preserve looking for the best photographic shots of the various animals. It was a long day- 12 hours but definitely worth it.
This was our first encounter with wildlife- a group of impalas.
There are a lot of impalas in the preserve. In fact, so many that it got to the point where if anyone said, "Stop, I see something", that we would say, "Oh, it's just another impala.
We stopped by a mudhole and found a large group of hippopottimi lazing in the afternoon sun.
This is a dead giraffe. We couldn't decide how he died because there is a large slit down the back of its neck.
We saw this lone ostrich foraging along the road.
There were lots of giraffe in the preserve!!!
Our guide is a professional wildlife photographer, and he brings all sorts of camera equipment on his trips for customers to borrow if they don't have their own. He lent me a 100-400mm professional level Canon lens which I used to the utmost. Won't be buying though at $1600. for the lens only!!!
How does a giraffe, being so tall, take a drink of water? Very carefully!!!
We found a favorite watering hole for a variety of animals including giraffes, impalas, warthogs, and zebras.
Here's a group of zebra that came down for a refreshing drink. There's also a warthog in the upper right corner of the photo!
I found the stripes on these animals to be so dramatic, especially with a large, powerful telephoto lens like the 100-400.
No safari to Africa would be complete without seeing a rhino. Here we had to stop at an apparent rhino crossing.
At 4:00 we were about ready to head back to our hotel..... The problem was that we had seen no lions, and our guide was checking all the favorite haunts. We were heading down into a dip in the road when we came across this pride of six lions, two large and four smaller ones.. There were some young males in the group.
Here's a shot of one of the young males!
We were very lukcy to have found this pride when we did. We almost missed seeing them.