Berg En Dahl Day 6

I was up at 5am, it had rained during the night and Ellie wasn’t in too much of a hurry to get going but I had other plans and luckily our old neighbour who was still there was leaving today and he wasn’t being quiet about it, so not long after me Ellie was also up.
The plan for today was to do a quick game drive killing a couple of hours this morning looking for leopard before heading out of the Malalane gate near camp to get some food shopping and diesel from Malalane but the universe had other plans.
We left camp at 6am and drove down the tar road. Instead of taking the first gravel road on the right today I planned to take the third turning and then go straight over at the bottom but when I got to our usual first turning there was a stack of cars.
Lions, and they were on a kill. Unfortunately they were under a hedge so nobody could see them but that doesn’t stop a queue forming just incase. We quickly moved on and 500 meters down the road we came across 2 hyena. These were the first hyena we had seen in this area and they looked completely different to the ones we had up at Maroela. These were 2 males and they were lighter than other hyenas we had seen and much stockier. These 2 were sniffing at everything like they were on heat. We got some photos and moved on.
We turned right at the third gravel road and crawled along letting other cars pass us at each river overlook. I wanted today to be the day, it’s wasn’t raining, it was overcast but not dark and the roads were still pretty quiet.
I reached the end of the road and nothing. First off I turned left and drove through the riverbed passing a sleeping rhino where all the game vehicles were queued up and I went to James pan, I did a quick U turn back through the river bed and then left. A game vehicle came flying past and then I blocked the road by stating un the middle and sped up and 500 meters down the road were about 6 cars and 3 game vehicles. This was the spot we had seen the mating lions yesterday and my initial thought was to turn around but I drove upto the back of the car on the right looked across the open plain looking for the lion and Ellie said “look, there’s a leopard in a tree” and there it was. Just 100 meters away low down with no cover was a huge leopard eating an impala. This is the shot I wanted and I grabbed the camera a started shooting. The great thing was everybody that was here had a great view as we were in a big bend that arced around the tree.
I took hundreds of photos before the leopard finally had enough, jumped down and disappeared into the bush but we noticed half the impala still in the tree.
Once the leopard had gone we noticed that the lady infront of us had a puncture so under the watchful eye of a few game viewers and a safari truck I used our compressor to reinflate the tyre and then followed her back to camp to make sure she was ok. Then we popped back to the caravan where I noticed I had a puncture so I reinflated our back tyre and then drove the 22 kilometres to Malalane and popped into tyremart to get the tyre repaired which only cost us £6 and then we went shopping in spar.
We got back to camp at 12:30pm, I had a quick cup of tea and then I left Ellie at camp and drove back to where the leopard had left half an impala hanging in a tree, there was still a mountain of traffic at the same lions we saw this morning. I arrived at 2pm and after an hour of sitting and waiting more impala started turning up. They looked up in the tree at the dead impala and started grunting. It was almost like they were crying.
At 4pm the colour in the tree disappeared and I looked in the side mirror to see a huge black cloud rolling in. I waited another 15 minutes and at 4:15pm I gave up waiting as the best of the light had gone.
It was 25km back to camp and half way down the gravel tracks the heavens opened and it really started to throw it down. The track very quickly became a thick gravy consistency. The tar roads weren’t much better when I reached them. The roads had disappeared and were now rivers and in every dip was a good 10 inches of water. I had the windscreen wipers on full and even on the flat roads there was a good 3 inches of water.
I got back to camp and I parked just 20 feet away from the caravan but I could hardly see it because the rain was so hard. I really expected Ellie to be plugging leaks left, right and centre but I ran to the door, opened it and there she was sitting on the bed on her phone. The tent was fine.
At 6pm the rain eased off enough to start cooking and we lit the Braai with charcoal and I made burgers, then once the washing up was done we went inside to watch tv whilst yet more rain and a big storm broke above us.Læs mere