Makala National Park - Day 2

We got up at 6am with the sun, our battery had been fine all night without the fridge and we had the fans running all night. So we know there is not enough power in the battery at the moment to run the fridge but as soon as the sun came up the solar panels started charging.
After a couple of coffees I went for a shower and when I was in there my head said “ you just know that Ellie is over the neighbours asking them about there power situation”, and when I came out the shower that’s exactly where she was. She had gone next door to ask them if they knew anything about the power and being off grid. They didn’t but he introduced to Harry next door and Harry had all the gadgets. He came over and tested the voltage in the battery which was correct but that doesn’t tell us how many amps are in the battery. After 30 minutes he came to the same conclusion as me, and that is that we need to replace the broken dc to dc charger. Then he told us about a store called 4x4 mega world, which I had heard of but thought it was just a shop but apparently they do everything you could ever want and have workshops so tomorrow when we leave we are going to have to back track to Bloemfontein and find 4x4 mega world which is actually in our favour as we could head that way or a different way to get to our next National park but it would have taken 7 hours and we needed a camp, now we know we can stay at the Mosalspoort resort and it’s nice.
After thanking everyone for having a look we jumped in the car and we went on a game drive, it was now 10am and I didn’t expect to see much but we were surprised.
After doing a loop drive near the campsite which was fairly quiet of animals we headed in the direction of the Lillydale camp at the other end of the park. It was 30kms away and we just poodled at 20kph. We saw 2 rock monitors that were huge, a yellow mongoose, baby hartibeast, zebra and a rhino. The drive was great as it was all off-road through sandy tracks and puddles and the scenery was constantly changing from rocky, to grasslands to huge rock hills and then open plains. Makala is Africaans for camel thorn which is the name of the trees that are spread everywhere in this park, they have huge 1.5 inch thorns that are like nails, and they can grow to 17 meters although most of these trees are 10-12 meters.
We were hours driving and we got back to camp at 2:30pm and Ellie went for a nap whilst I had some lunch. Then when Ellie got back up we watched some warthogs playing around the watering hole and finally at 5pm we lit the Braai and did some dinner.
Then at 7pm I set the trap camera to watch the watering hole and at 9pm we headed into the caravan to bed.Read more