Rhinos, Lions etc

This morning was bright and sunny so I set off to the Rhino and Lion Park, a hybrid zoo/game reserve on the outskirts of Joburg - apparently the closest place to the city where you can see some of the big five: buffalo as well as, obviously, lions and rhinos - though I only saw the rhinos at the last minute when I was leaving the park, as they roam free so aren't that easy to find. The lions, on the other hand, are in pens, so it's easy to find them. Apart from the "brown lions" this park also has white lions and white tigers - as well as, er, non-white tigers - and a "creche" area where baby predators can grown up safely surrounded by electric fences and tourists like me.

More interesting, for me, was the "hippo pool" area where you can walk along paths past sleeping lions and tigers and climb onto observation platforms and take a look at African lake life - I didn't actually see any hippos, but I was the only human there, which made it feel more atmospheric - I saw a couple of lizards circling each other endlessly in some intense reptilian ritual (if I went right up to them they disappeared into a bush, but they came back immediately when I moved away, and returned to their mobile Mexican stand-off); and I saw a group of bright yellow butterflies exploding away from some significant but featureless patch of grass and returning, over and over. On the way back to the car a tiger (I think) roared in the undergrowth a few metres away from me - behind a strong fence, sure, but scarey anyway - the instinctive reaction to this sort of noise is uncontrollable, I find. And when I got back to my car I found I had a visitor crawling over the back seat - a small bright brown and iridescent green stag beetle. And of course all the time and everywhere there's the lush vegetation, the flowers, the spiny trees with their weird seeds, the birds... It's always well worth while to get out of the city.

Above: white lion, white tigers, pond life, butterfly dance, lizard fight, storks come in to land on a rhino (note the baby behind the mum), the beetle hitchhiker.