Day 19, Year 6 Wild Wonderful Africa, Day 4
Date: Friday, November 12, 2010
Weather: Sunny, Windy Day with Rain Late Afternoon
Location: Tuzi Gazi Marina, Richards Bay, South Africa
We’re back on Windbird after four fabulous days of touring. Weather ruled the week, but we enjoyed the wildlife on the three sunny days and enjoyed learning about Zulu history and culture on the rainy, rainy day. The heavy rain late on Tuesday and all day Wednesday changed the landscape of Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Reserve overnight. When we drove through on Tuesday, you could tell that there had been a few spring rains and things were starting to green but the roads were still dry and dusty. When we returned on Thursday after the heavy rains, the dust was gone and everything was glistening green and bursting with blossoms. The highlight of visiting at this time of year was that we got to see the babies. It seems they start popping out as soon as the rains come. The big disappointment was that we didn’t get to see all of the Big 5. With our last efforts today, the cats still eluded us. We were close, so close, to seeing lions, but it didn’t happen. When we drove north from the iMfolozi part of the park northward into the Hluhluwe section early this morning, we discovered that the road that was our last hold out for seeing lions was closed due to damage from the heavy rains. So we drove immediately to the nearby Hilltop Camp, the park’s signature resort, to see if we could get any information on where else we might find lions. Here we discovered that last night there had been a kill nearby and while the male lion was partaking a pack of hyenas came and actually scared him up a tree. The first guided tours out this morning saw the lion in the tree with the lioness on the ground below. The ranger gave us directions to the sight, but by the time we got there, the lions were nowhere in sight. We are told that we will definitely see lions in Kruger Park when we visit, so we will look forward to that.
The Hilltop Camp where we went to get information was really upscale from the camp where we stayed at Mpila. Hilltop looks like an expensive resort with a beautiful lobby, restaurant, and bar overlooking spectacular scenery. It made us wish we had spent the few extra dollars to stay there, even though we did enjoy our stay in the safari tent. After leaving Hilltop and going on our wild lion chase, we finally accepted the fact that cats weren’t in our near future and we just enjoyed the abundance of animals that we did see. Today we saw a herd of more than 25 buffalo right beside the road and later we saw a herd of at least 20 elephants. Later in the day we saw a herd of at least 75 buffalo on a hillside just off the road and we got our first glimpse of a baby buffalo. We drove through areas today with numbers of Hoopee birds. We saw one of these in Madagascar, but today we got to see four and five at a time. When they fly all you see are black and white stripes like those of a zebra and then when they land you see their nutmeg-colored crest standing proud on their heads. We had giraffe and zebra road blocks today and thoroughly enjoyed the show while we waited for them to move.
We arrived back in Richards Bay around 3 pm and found a note in our cockpit from Casey Nickerson and Heidi Kephant of Wild Tigress. This is a boat in the ARC Round the World Rally that arrived this week while we were gone. Casey and Heidi are from New Hampshire and are friends of our good friends Alan and Helaine Kanegsberg. They came by yesterday to meet us, but discovered that we were gone. When we got home and read the note, we immediately drove over to Zululand Yacht Club to find them, but they were out touring. Unfortunately they are headed down the coast to Port Elizabeth tomorrow, so I’m not sure we are going to get to meet them. It would have been great to meet someone else out here from New Hampshire. Maybe we will catch up with them somewhere down the line.
Tomorrow’s job is to get photos from this week posted on the website. We have posted a few from our first day in the park on Tuesday, but will have the full complement posted tomorrow. We want you to be able to share our excitement in seeing some of Africa’s wild kingdom.
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| 101112 Day 19a South Africa–Hluhluwe-iMfolozi, Day 4 |
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| 101112 Day19b South Africa–ARC at Zululand YC |
