Maroela Rest Camp Day 6

We had decided yesterday not to get up at the crack of dawn as we hadn’t been seeing much really early do today I got up at 5:15am, made coffees and we left with our bag of washing to do at Satara at 6am and just as we were leaving camp Mike the ranger was coming in. He gave us a big wave as he passed then he realised who we were and we both stopped and reversed upto each other.
“Good morning” he said “ what do you want to see?”
I immediately said “ leopard”
“ oh, your not interested in wild dog then?” He replied
“ I’m always interested in wild dogs”
He told us to turn left at the tar road, don’t stop at the big herd of elephants and just before you get to the kingfisher ranger road the wild dogs are at the side of the road sleeping and there’s not many cars.
We thanked him and done the speed limit of 50kph. We saw the huge herd of elephant it was massive and we would have stopped as it was so big but with our new information we continued and as we rounded a bend there were 4 cars queued up in the left with 8 wild dogs sleeping on the right hand side. It’s always incredible to see wild dogs and they behave so much like domestic dogs that live together.
We stayed at the wild dogs for 10 minutes until game vehicles started to come and then we moved on, our mission today was to get the washing done. As we approached the S36 gravel road crossroads we looked across at where we saw the hyena a couple of days ago and there were some out and as we got closer we saw it was 2 mothers with their pups suckling. It was a lucky spot.
From the hyena we drove to Satara camp and got change from reception and put in 2 loads of washing. Then we went to the restaurant and had toasties for breakfast before retrieving our clean clothes. The washing was done and we’d seen wild dogs and hyena and had breakfast all by 9am.
From Satara I turned left out of the gate to take the gravel road home but it was still closed so we had to double back and at Satara camp we turned left again taking the river road as far as we could before turning right and crossing the river. I was looking for leopard which we didn’t find but we did find big herds of animals with lots of babies especially the impala. This route took roughly 2 hours and once we got to tarmac again it took us 30 minutes to reach Satara and then another hour to reach our camp. We finally got home at 1:45pm and we were both knackered and annoyingly a Swiss camper has squeezed it’s way into the gap between us and our neighbours even though there are hundreds of spots and they have met up with friends and are talking very loudly so a quick nap was out of the question even with earphones in.
We sat around camp with 2 hyena just the other side of the fence watching us for the rest of the day and at 4pm I lit the Braai and cooked Wors with veg and relish and we were done by 6pm.Read more