(Note: As in previous postings including vidoes, I don’t trust how they will come across so I have done them twice. If clicking on the video picture itself doesn’t work, clicking on the link beneath the picture should take you to the You Tube site where they reside. If neither of these work, please contact me.)
While nothing quite substitutes for being there, I did take a few videos of us while on the game drive. These are not necessarily dramatic or specific to any particular aspect of the game drive but are meant, instead, to give you a bit of a feel for what it looks like to be on a game drive. Again, since these are
The first video, which is about 1:28 in length, is a fairly typical game drive segment, over fairly smooth ground and facing forward.
Note several things about this video. First the word “smooth” is a relative term. We’re on a dirt track and it’s the dry winter season so the surface is somewhat smoother than it might be at other times. And as long as we’re on tracks that are generally used by various vehicles, it’s somewhat smoother than going cross-country – which we did do at some times. There are a myriad of tracks criss-crossing the area (with no signs of any kind) so we only rarely had to leave the beaten track (so to speak).
Much of the audio portion of the video is the sound of wind blowing. It wasn’t all that windy but riding in an open-sided vehicle at even fairly slow speed results in a lot of wind noise at least from the camera’s perspective. You’ll also hear some chit-chat among the members of our group as well as comments from our driver and the occasional input from the radio which is in communication with other vehicles. When we come to actual animals close up everyone is supposed to be (and usually were) quiet, primarily not to scare the animals away.
The following video, which is about 1:12 in length, shows what happens when you come across an animal, in this case a small bird in the middle of the road. I believe this was a special bird.
And, of course we come across larger animals, sometimes in the road itself. This 14 second video shows why the giraffe crosses the road – are at least the wonderfully elegant gait it has in making the journey – and how we don’t wait a long time to continue our journey (in fairness, by the time of this video, we had seen a great many giraffes).
The final 40 second video shows a bit rougher journey when we cross a dry river (again, remembering that we’re in winter which is the dry season). The bridge is a fairly narrow (just a few inches wider than the vehicle) block of what looks like concrete. And the road drops fairly steeply down to and up from the bridge, resulting in a bit of jostling as can be seen.
Next up: A “foot safari”
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