Back in Marloth Park

We were awake at 7am and I got up, went to the kitchen to put the kettle on and I was greeted by an Impala sticking his head over our fence waiting for food. Unfortunately we didn’t have any yet so I unlocked our stupid doors and that scared him off.
I made coffee and then we sat outside drinking then watching Impala and bushbuck wander by.
By 9am we were ready to go out and our first stop of the day was the Marloth Game store where we could get food for the animals. We brought a huge bag of sweet potatoes and a 40kg bag of pellets.
After the game store we popped into the supermarket to get ourselves some food but only brought butter and bread as we decided they didn’t have everything we needed and as we had the camper we could drive to the closest town to get a better variety of food.
Our closest town is Komatiport and it was a 30 minute drive to get there. The drive was lovely with little traffic but komatiport itself was a bit hectic and South Africa has this thing where you have to drive through lots of car parks to get to the supermarket and that was a bit of a challenge.
In the Spar we brought a full weeks shopping of meals, extra bottled water and soaps for the shower. It cost us £70 but there were quite a few one off items in that.
From komatiport we headed back home and unloaded our goodies, then Ellie made us avocado on toast for lunch.
After lunch we then decided to check out what was in our camper and see how hard the tent was to put up.
Our little camper is amazing. The back has 2 slide out compartments. The top one is for our bags and stuff and the bottom one has 6 boxes. Each box has it’s own labelled lid and in those boxes are sleeping bags, groundsheet, wash towels and soaps and blankets, kettle cups, plates and cutlery, a gas stove and spare gas, spares for the camper. Down the side of the slide out is our tent and it was super easy to put up. Then there are 2 big foam mattress and 2 pillows in a net on the inside of the roof.
The fridge has 6 compartments and also has 2 stainless steel water bottles and opposite the fridge are 2 lock boxes to put our own stuff in.
After we had rummaged around in the camper and played with the tent we locked up and headed out to explore.
Our first stop was a bird hide overlooking the crocodile river where we saw lots of hippos in the water and lots of impala on the banks.
Here we met an elderly couple who had moved to Marloth Park a year ago and they loved it.
From the bird hide we followed crocodile road along the rivers edge until we came back to the main road. Then we drove all the down to the first security gates and picked up Seeskoi road running alongside the river again.
Along this road we saw, waterbuck, impala, warthog, kudu, zebra and giraffe. It was a great little game drive on our own and as the speed limit is 30kph we just bumbled along for hours watching the wildlife and admiring the houses.
We finally got back to our house at 4pm.
It was still 36°c when we got back and I went for a dip in the splash pool to cool off whilst Ellie started sorting out food for the Brae we were going to have for dinner and she lit the fire. She also through out some of the pellets and sweet potato we brought earlier and within minutes we had 2 bushbuck and 4 impala in the garden closely followed by 3 warthog. Then to our amazement a whole family of mongoose came running through so Ellie went and got our eggs and threw 3 of them on the ground. The mongoose loved them and it was so funny watching them and listening to there little squeaks as they were eating, they also had lots of babies.
Ellie started cooking around 5:30pm, and we had ostrich steaks with Brae rolls. It wasn’t as good as Pete’s cooking, he is now being missed.
After dinner and just as the sun was setting I set up camera traps and Ellie put out some yogurt and bananas to encourage the bush babies, then we just sat back and watched and waited.
The Bushbabies came at 7:30pm. I first sign of them was hearing a rustle in the trees and as we looked up we saw them jumping. I put my hand in front of my face to block out our silly garden lights and then we could see that they were already on the feeding table munching away. We were gutted the garden lights were obstructing our vision so tomorrow night we’re going to cover the lights so we can see down the garden. But atleast we know bushbabies are here.Read more