The paths of Kruger Park

Peço licença aos meus dois leitores e meio em português pra postar, a pedido dos meus outros dois leitores, os não brasileiros, um texto em inglês. Trata-se de uma tradução do texto anterior, 'As veredas do Kruger Park'. Meus agradecimentos à colega Thais e seu digníssimo, Diogo, que verteram o material do vernáculo pátrio para o anglófono.


As João Guimarães Rosa, a Brazilian writer, once wrote, sertão is as large as the world. It goes as far as your eyes can see. During these days of drought, sertão is like an enormous ocean of dark colors, such as yellow, brown, grey, and, sometimes, green. Kruger Park, the biggest national park in South Africa is like a huge sertão. An endless plain land, made of small, dry, twisted trees, spreads across dozens of kilometers all the way to the horizon, where all these dark colors meet the blue of the sky.

Created in 1989, by former president of the Transvaal Republic (nowadays, part of South Africa), Paul Kruger, the park functioned, in its early years, as a reserve intended to protect wildlife. By that time, no tourist visit was allowed. It was only in 1926, when it was officially turned into a national park, that Kruger Park started to receive visitors. Hundreds, thousands, millions of them.

Since that, the park has grown and continues on growing as one of the most important destinations for adventurers from all over the world who search for wild animals - and, at the same time, as a land were these animals are, in fact, wild. In Kruger Park, life follows its natural course with both big and small battles to survive.

The park numbers are impressive. Its total area is up to 2 million hectares - equivalent, for example, to Israel. It received, in 2006, 1.2 million tourists, close to a fifth of all visitors who come to Brazil during one whole year. There are 12.5 thousand elephants, 7 thousand rhino, 7 thousand giraffes, 21 thousand zebras and 120 thousand impalas (a kind of antelope) according to the last cense, which took place in 2005.

We traveled across Kruger Park in a three day safari from the main entrance, the Paul Kruger Gate. We could see, live, almost all these species. Out of the called 'big five', the quintet of large mammals that fulfill the dreams of safari operators (bull, lion, rhino, elephant and leopard), we just were not able to see the leopard, a wild cat related to the Brazilian jaguar. That maybe due to its reserved personality, less inclined to public apparitions. Personality that is, actually, the opposite of another related wild cat, the lion, which shows no embarrassment and with an enormous dose of vanity, parades among the cars of marveled tourists and the thousand clicks from digital cameras (see the picture). This is also an identifiable personality characteristic of many leo, such as this writer.

But differently of what you can imagine by the numbers, travel across this sertão’s dusty roads looking for animals is quite a patience exercise. Men, here, are just spectators. The animals, the land owners, are there, but not to be watched, like in a zoo. Predators and preys carry out, daily, their roles, minding no men. That is why you need to learn to delight yourself with the small clues that theses daily battles leave throughout the burned soil of the African savannah.
The carcass of an antelope devoured by a lion, for example, left by the side of the road (see the picture); the scratches, on a tree trunk, made by the nails of a leopard which sharpened its claws there, like a huge cat; the rhino’s excrements splattered on the floor in a way to show the other rhinos that he is the owner of the area; the huge and round footprints of an elephant. Sertão is not obvious. Nature is not obvious.