Monkeys are fun…until they try to hurt you.

The Friday before Christmas, Chase and I spent our first night away from Findley since he was born. We needed the break, quite frankly, and Patience agreed to stay at our house and watch him so we knew he was in good hands. Our destination was a lodge called Tau situated in Madikwe game reserve on the far northern border of South Africa and Botswana. Madikwe is the 4th largest game reserve in South Africa and is home to all five of the “Big 5”: lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino and leopard. You always hear people talk about the Big 5 here, a label coined by big-game hunters long ago in reference to the five most difficult animals to hunt on foot. So it is with equal measure of respect and awe, and perhaps a sprinkle of fear, that people trudge out to game reserves all over in the region in hopes of spotting them all. I am not sure what we were looking forward to more, the chance to see as many animals in the wild as possible, or the prospect of sleeping past 5AM on Saturday, but the pang of guilt we felt at leaving our little guy slipped away as we arrived at the beautiful lodge tucked away deep into Madikwe.

After lunch and a nap, we woke to the sound of a herd of elephants playing in the water hole just outside our chalet. We went on a game drive in the early evening and saw lots of animals, including 4 of the Big 5 (no leopards unfortunately), warthogs, giraffe, impala, springbock, kudu and wildebeest. The guide gave us lots of good dinner party trivia (Did you know giraffes copulate for 3 seconds, then sleep for half an hour? Or that Hippos cause more human deaths here every year than any other animal—not from eating people but from charging and knocking over boats and then people drowning as a result because most locals here don’t know how to swim.) After a brief stop on the drive for sundowners (cocktails) at sunset, we went back to the lodge for a big dinner. We did sleep in the next morning, and words can’t describe how good it felt. Lodges like Tau are not cheap, but we definitely left feeling like we got our full money’s worth. Aside from one unfortunate incident where I was chased by a monkey outside our chalet (unfortunate for me, funny for Chase), the entire stay was great.

We decided after checking out to drive an hour south to visit a place we heard about recently from a friend. There are many, many game parks and lodges in South Africa. As you drive down the main road leading to Johannesburg, passing cars with peril on the two lane highway that dissects flat bush terrain reminiscent of west Texas, you see sign after sign for turnoffs to different B&B/lodges. There are too many for the guide books to cover them all, so you run the risk of missing some hidden gems. One such place is Tala Manzi. There is no website for Tala Manzi and they do not do any advertising. It is run by a young Africaaner husband and wife who raise lions, and for the equivalent of about $10 you can go and hang out with lion cubs ranging from 5 weeks to one year old. We went from one group to the next, holding the smallest ones only slightly bigger than a house cat, to playing with the larger ones who definitely could have had us for dinner but were tame enough to permit our rolling on the ground with them. It was very strange going from the lodge we stayed at the night before, where we had to keep careful distance from the animals (see earlier comment about the monkey), to a place where domesticated wart hogs and kudu are chilling out next to dogs and lions. The whole drive home we kept saying “Did we really just play with lions?”

By the time we got back to the house Saturday evening we could not wait to see Findley. The smile he greeted us with dismissed silly concerns we had about whether or not he missed us or would be glad to see us. Hugs, kisses and then we gave him a colorful hand-made rattle purchased from the game lodge. He promptly banged it on the ground so hard that it shattered, tiny pebbles scattering all over the floor as our dog Kima started to eat them. (No doubt his way of saying “welcome home but time to get back to reality.”)