A day on safari

Private morning safari

This particular day, we started by waking up an hour later than usually. What a luxury: it was not later than 6am, but it felt like sleeping until 11am. The evening before Paul and I decided to do the morning drive together, without a ranger. It’s one of the great benefits of the game reserve: as a shareholder, you are in control of how you want to spend your day.

It promised to be another very hot day. Because of this, we started our game drive by going to one of the waterholes. Apart from a couple of undisturbed male kudus we didn’t see many animals at the waterhole. You never can tell what you will see. We decided to continue our drive by taking it slowly; enjoying the scenery, and taking the time to stop and observe the animals we passed. A couple of giraffes agreed with us about the temperature, they were already resting in the shade of a tree.

Relaxing in the afternoon

On our way back to the private lodges we saw lots of impala drinking at a smaller waterhole, and a female impala that was benefitting from the fact that an elephant had dug up a water pipe. She had her own “natural” waterhole.

Because of the heat, it was a great day to spend a couple of hours at the pool at the main camp. The water in the pool wasn’t as refreshing is normally, it was almost warm. But still, we weren’t complaining.

Sundowner

Our afternoon drive, with ranger, started more promising than our morning drive: a brown hyena, not shy at all! He was on a mission: continued where he was going, undisturbed by our presence.
We saw zebra, giraffe, eland – and we ran into Clive and Jill (co-owners) who were parked near one of the waterholes; relaxing and waiting for wildlife. They hadn’t seen much during this drive, but did see a lot of animals during their stay in the game reserve. This was their last drive before going back to England and they were totally happy. We continued our drive, had a nice sundowner at one of the many beautiful spots in the reserve, and decided to drive back to the lodges.

Lions have been spotted!

Suddenly, there was a lot of radio traffic between our ranger and one of the other rangers: lions! We were all excited, knew we wanted to go there, and also knew that we had to find Clive and Jill! Wouldn’t it be great if we could all see the lions that night? Luckily, we almost drove into Clive and Jill, told them what was going on and they got into our game drive vehicle.

Our ranger was constantly in contact with the other ranger. We knew that we had enough time; the lions weren’t going anywhere. By the time we arrived at the spot; the adrenaline was rushing through our veins, all anxious to see the lions. Our ranger approached them very cautiously, and there they were: relaxed but very aware of our presence. Two of them were observing us from under the bushes, and one of them was a bit curious. They were beautiful, looking strong and healthy. How lucky are we that they decided to choose our reserve as their new habitat!

After having observed us for a while, the lions decided that they were thirsty, so they got up and went to the waterhole. We, and the other game drive vehicle, followed them and they continued being relaxed and not bothered by us at all.

What a sighting; we were all so happy, and by the way: it’s a female!