Once again we find ourselves back with wilderness. Except this time it's a little more self-directed. The national park where we find ourselves allows you to take your own vehicle into the game area and view at your own speed. That does also lead to a few potential risks, given the inexperience of most people as it relates to game. Well today we had a couple of close calls.
1. We went to Hapoor (a watering hole famous for elephants) this morning to find literally hundreds of elephants playing in the water. It was absolutely mid-boggling. We figured there were about 200 present when we showed up and more kept coming. With this amount of animals in one place, a crowd of vehicles started to form on the nearby road. But as the vehicles swarmed, so did the elephants until each group was within 5m of each other. An elephant heard this large means there was lots of mating and lots of challenges happening. The challenges would see elephants battling out for supremacy to allow a better opportunity for mating. But when this challenges started happening right beside the vehicles, everyone started getting nervous. There were a few times where Christina quickly pulled the vehicle away and many others did the same. Thankfully everyone got a great show and it seemed no vehicles were damaged. As we were watching the whole thing, we noted that basically whenever we see elephants for the remainder of our lives, it will never be as interesting as this was.
2. The second close encounter of the day was a lot more unexpected. We had stopped at a local shop and picked up some savory meat pies and drove into the secure (no elephants) picnic area. Once we got there, we noticed there were no people and only a few monkeys hanging around. Christina had been wanting to see monkeys since we got here so it was pretty exciting. We got out of the car (allowed in the secure area) to get some better photos. As we got closer we realized that the monkeys had no fear of us at all. Christina apparently got a little closer than the one monkey liked and it started towards her. It got within a few feet and started showing its teeth. Efforts to intimidate it and scare it were fruitless. We went from excited to see the monkeys to afraid of getting bitten within 2 minutes. But we still hadn't had our snacks yet so we located a picnic area far away and started eating. As we were finishing our pies, sure enough, the monkeys found us and chased us from the table. It was at this point that I discovered we had "monkey repellent." Christina had a bottle of iced tea sitting on the table. I managed to scared the monkeys off enough to clear cameras and wrappers from the table including the iced tea. When the monkey started getting aggressive again I tried squirting iced tea at it. And it worked! Very well. The monkey retreated enough that we were able to get our stuff into the car. Now the monkey was waiting on the table, thankfully calm. So I managed to get a few photos of it before we left. While it was sitting on the table though, it started licking the iced tea. Soon thereafter, it discovered that the iced tea was delishesh. This was bad news. Our repellent was now useless. We quickly got in the car and got the heck outta dodge before we had any more trouble with the monkeys.
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