July 22, 2019
Continuing about 150 km north, our next stop was Mapungubwe National Park. The park is in South Africa and is located near and along the Limpopo River and the borders of Botswana and Zimbabwe.
The park is split in half, with the Eastern and Western sections separated by farmland. The campsite is partially fenced, primarily to keep out elephants, but monkeys, baboons and nyala roam freely around the site.
The nyala are small to mid-sized and are very similar to white-tailed deer. They are habituated and would literally walk up to you and sniff and lick your hands with the expectation of food. This is great, but unfortunately, they have become this way because, without a doubt, people feed them. Not a good thing.
Every evening at sunset, two bush babies would leap effortlessly through the trees surrounding our site. The distance they can leap is quite amazing, and they do so without any sound whatsoever. We didn’t get any pictures of them, but we did a little farther along in our travels.
Before we arrived at our camp, we picked up groceries at a Choppies grocery store. Near the checkout, they had a CFC stand—Choppies Fried Chicken. It looked great, so we figured we would be lazy on our first night at the campsite.
We were very happy we did this, as the four bundles of firewood we purchased at the park gate might as well have been wet noodles. It was impossible to start a fire—more like a smudge—so our CFC chicken came in very handy that evening.
