Sitting here on Saturday afternoon after an epic journey home. When we got home I was physically sick, as the journey had taken some much out of me and I'd spend the last 12 hours of so of the journey in pain with stomach cramps. Would I do it again - Hell Yeah, it was planned as the holiday of a lifetime and it lived up to it !!
But anyhow last day - our American jeep buddies were ding an elephant interaction at the same time as the famous 6 am drive but were meeting up with us for the last hour or so, so in effect Julie and I had a private game drive with our excellent game driver + spotter. Again we are the first one's to land - the lodge is only 1/2 full at the moment with the 4 in our jeep, 4 middle age Argentinian women who were white prada for the game drives and a Brazilian couple who have the sole ambition of sampling every one of the 150 optic bottles.
As game drives go it's not very exciting although we do get to spot some of the ugly 5 - hyena, wildebeest, vulture, warthog and the marabou stork. We don't get the hyena but we do manage the other 4. We know Jeffery the ranger is looking for something but we don't know what. We do get too find a bunch of hippo's (which we haven't see many of) by the River Lodge building of the reserve and we get slightly voyeur pictures of mating hippos ! We stopt at about 8am for our morning coffee and snack break and catch photos of giraffe and antelope walking near the truck as we relax
But anyhow last day - our American jeep buddies were ding an elephant interaction at the same time as the famous 6 am drive but were meeting up with us for the last hour or so, so in effect Julie and I had a private game drive with our excellent game driver + spotter. Again we are the first one's to land - the lodge is only 1/2 full at the moment with the 4 in our jeep, 4 middle age Argentinian women who were white prada for the game drives and a Brazilian couple who have the sole ambition of sampling every one of the 150 optic bottles.
As game drives go it's not very exciting although we do get to spot some of the ugly 5 - hyena, wildebeest, vulture, warthog and the marabou stork. We don't get the hyena but we do manage the other 4. We know Jeffery the ranger is looking for something but we don't know what. We do get too find a bunch of hippo's (which we haven't see many of) by the River Lodge building of the reserve and we get slightly voyeur pictures of mating hippos ! We stopt at about 8am for our morning coffee and snack break and catch photos of giraffe and antelope walking near the truck as we relax
Our American friends are then transferred onto our vehicle and the spotting suddently goes up a notch. We almost knock over a crash of rhino's who run into the road without Jeffrey seeing them and then spot 3 male lions just hanging and then finally what the ranger had been searching for - a herd of buffalo
And with that it's the beginning of the end of Africa 18. We are met of the drive by the admin and instructed that check-out is at 11am, our transfer vehicle will pick us up at 12.30 to take us to the nearby Hoespruit airport for stage 1 of the journey home. We take breakfast and then head back to the room to start the packing after saying goodbye to our new buddies, they are heading of to another game reserve - lucky blighters. I ditch a couple of pairs of rather stinky shoes and we are more than happy that we will be under our weight limit for the journey home. It simply hasn't been a shopping trip and apart from souvenirs there isn't really much to buy for other people - so we haven't !!
Our bags are taken at 11 and we have final drinks at the lodge before Kapama provide a standard safari vehicle to drive us to the airport. It's not really surprising the reserve do this the airport is literally at the entrance to the reserve- we are there in 5 and the fun begins. It's a stretch to call it an airport , it's a military base with a couple of desks which serve as a check-in, tractors take the bags to the planes and you walk across the field to get to the plane. It's tiny, and chaos, 3 flights already have been delayed so that the airport cannot cope and it's boiling and there is no air con in the building. There's no announcements and no-one seems to know what is happening. We start to panic but eventually after 1.5 hour delay people start to murmur that our Jo-Burg flight is going out and sure enough it is. We arrive safe and sound but because of the delay and the extremely tight flight security, possibly because of it being Emirates we are on the back foot.
We were planning of having a meal at the brew house in the airport but we simply trudge to the gate and board for the 2 most boring, miserable flights I've ever been on !! And now we are home
But a holiday full of highlights and bucket-list
Our bags are taken at 11 and we have final drinks at the lodge before Kapama provide a standard safari vehicle to drive us to the airport. It's not really surprising the reserve do this the airport is literally at the entrance to the reserve- we are there in 5 and the fun begins. It's a stretch to call it an airport , it's a military base with a couple of desks which serve as a check-in, tractors take the bags to the planes and you walk across the field to get to the plane. It's tiny, and chaos, 3 flights already have been delayed so that the airport cannot cope and it's boiling and there is no air con in the building. There's no announcements and no-one seems to know what is happening. We start to panic but eventually after 1.5 hour delay people start to murmur that our Jo-Burg flight is going out and sure enough it is. We arrive safe and sound but because of the delay and the extremely tight flight security, possibly because of it being Emirates we are on the back foot.
We were planning of having a meal at the brew house in the airport but we simply trudge to the gate and board for the 2 most boring, miserable flights I've ever been on !! And now we are home
But a holiday full of highlights and bucket-list
- Swimming with Great Whites
- Table Mountain
- Going on Safari and spotting weird and wonderful animals like Civets & Pangolin
- Petting a baby Cheetah
- The Wine Tram