I thought it was going to be an ordinary drive as always, just my two guests and I….
As we departed from the lodge at 4:30 for the evening drive we saw the usual as we see every time- white Rhino, Zebra, Wildebeest and Impala. As the guests were here for their first safari they were very interested in every single thing they saw, but after an hours drive of just seeing the same we stopped stopping for every single plains game.
As I was driving towards fish eagle picnic spot, just before the access, I got a radio in that one of the other rangers had spotted a leopard on Red Syanite Hill… and that is were our real drive began.
It was 6pm and so I informed my guests that we will go for our sundowners later, but now we will go see the leopard.I did warn them that we were not going to stop for any animal till we get to the leopard-as it is very rare to see one.
As luck may have it on the way we spotted a Kori Bustard-one of the heaviest birds in South Africa that is capable of flight- about 8 metres of the road, and of course we had to stop for that. It was quite a nice view of the bird walking around in the plains.
A minute or so of admiring it went, time was ticking, for the leopard was lying at that moment but as soon as it would get up it would walk behind the mountain and it would disappear for good. On the way I had a few obstacles such as Zebra crossing and Impala deciding to feed right on the road sides making it impossible to pass them and the problem was that we still had quite a road bit to travel to get there. Finally we arrived at the sight with only one other Ivory Tree Vehicle there. I positioned the vehicle to have a clear view of this leopard (which was a good 500m away) and switched of the engine. Just 30 seconds after switching of the engine the leopard got up looked at us for few seconds and walked slowly down and behind the mountain with flashes going of left, right and centre. My guests absolutely loved it, and so we drove of satisfied.
As we drove I though luckily if we only see plains game all the way home, we at least had one satisfying sighting.
Then suddenly out of the blue some image caught my eye. Two rock looking things in the distance on the foot of a mountain a road away. Looking through the binoculars I spotted to rhinos and to my delight they were two Black Rhinos. I hurried up to the spot and called it in. We sat there looking at the rhino -that were about 300m of the road-that were looking at us. This was only my second time that I had been lucky enough to see Black Rhino in this park, so I was pretty excited to find it.
Finally we had time to go for our sundowners. Now it was getting quite dark. Just a half a kilometre before the hide we found a lovely hippo out of water that is quiet rare to find. As we were admiring him I got a call that there was an elephant on one of the roads close by…so of we went for another hunt down for the next great animal. As we got to the road the bull elephant just started to cross in front of us and the other vehicles that were there. He was a nice big bull and it was excellent to watch him walk past and start feeding. As we got closer he got abit agitated so we completely stopped and carried on watching him as he munched away. All one could hear is the munching. Finally we decided to get one drink in so we made a U-turn and went back to the road that would lead us to our hide.
At the exact spot where I got the call about the elephant, I got another call saying that they found some Lions. This time they were abit further than the elephant. I asked my guest if they don’t mind skipping sundowners and just going to see the lions. They were more than happy to do so.This time as we got to the spot were they were seen, they had disappeared into the thickets. The other two guides and I search around the area for a good 15 minutes, I thought that my luck had changed and that I was about to doubt seeing them….
Then we got a good call, the two sub-adult males of the central pride were walking on a road not to far from us. As we got there they just walked past my vehicle went abit of the road and just lay down. We stood there watching them for about 10 minutes as they lazed around, before they got up and walked off.
By now we were running quiet late to get to the lodge. With a quick haste we started our satisfied journey back home. As we went past we just saw herds of glowing eyes close and far from the road, almost as if someone lit amber coals along the way.
As we started dinner we enjoyed talking about our 4 out of 5 big five sighting and were convinced that we will find the Buffalo the next day…. sadly my luck ran out… At least we had a great encounter with some breeding herd of elephants-which is a story all on its own.
Monika Bydlinski- Guide
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