Our final game drive in the Kruger

We were up at 4:45am and after a couple of coffees we left camp just after 5:30am.
This morning was terrible for sightings and we got all the way to Orpen camp 45km away and hardly saw anything.
Halfway through the return journey we came across a queue of cars and our initial thoughts were it’s either lion or wild dogs, but we were wrong, it was a leopard up a tree with a kill. Unfortunately it really was a long way away and there was a landrover and safari vehicle hogging the prime spot and they weren’t even taking pictures. The unwritten rule is take your pictures and have your viewing and move on. Not these guys, they were proper camped out and blocking the road and after 15 minutes of waiting we managed to jossle our way into a decent position. We got a couple of shots and moved on.
By 9am the temperature was already in the 30’s and when we got back to camp at 10am for breakfast it was 34°c in the shade. After breakfast we didn’t really have anything to do so we dozed on our chairs and the sun got hotter and hotter.
Over at the wash house I had a cold shower and found a brown armoured cricket which was a weird looking creature and then at 2pm I suggested we just go for a drive to have the air con on so that’s what we did and we managed to get through the hottest part of the day in the car. Today it got to 41°c in the shade which was just to hot, and it’s only going to drop to 28°c overnight.
Back at camp we had dinner and we were joined by Martin the monitor again and some hornbills who decided to use the birdbath we had made.
At 7:00pm we headed back over to the fence line to watch for hyenas and luckily one walked right by us just the other side of the fence and after 10 minutes he came back.
We waited another 20 minutes and then decided to call it a night. We were in bed by 8pm.Read more