Berg En Dahl Day 7

I was up at 5:30am, a little later than I wanted but it had rained nearly all night. I made coffees and as I sat down to drink mine I realised how damp and grey it was. Not a very good day for photos so we didn’t leave camp until 6:30am.
My initial plan was to do the same road as yesterday to try and get the leopard again but that all changed when we realised the gravel roads were closed.
The lions from yesterday were still at the side of the road and had only moved about 500 meters and crossed over. There was already a steady stream of cars and game vehicles.
We got as far as the picnic site and we hadn’t seen much atall and I suggested we go back but it was only 7:30am, so ellie suggested we drive to pretorioskop camp to see what that was like so that’s what we did spotting a few hyena on the way and even some baby hyena.
We got to pretorioskop at 9:30am and realised this is the place they keep the anti poaching K-9 unit and rangers and all we could hear was barking dogs. We drove into the camp and decided to get breakfast and to our surprise the restaurant here is a wimpy, so we had our first wimpy of this trip.
We left pretorioskop at 10:30am and decided to take the gravel road back to the picnic site and then pick up the tar road. It was unbelievably bumpy and corrugated and there were some deep puddles. Just this 20km section took 90 minutes.
Back on the tar road we passed the picnic site and came to where the lions had been this morning. There was still a queue of cars and as we drove past the lions had moved so far back nobody could see them, but still they wait.
We got back to camp at 12:45pm and Ellie went for a nap whilst I sat outside watching impala across the river. I realised how lucky we had been to get that leopard yesterday. Today those roads aren’t open, if it rains again they might not be open tomorrow and then we leave so really that could have been our last proper game drive
unhindered this year.
After Ellie had slept for an hour we popped over to the pool for a swim to cool off and when we had dried off it was time to light the Braai and tonight I had Wors all to myself whilst Ellie had salad.
We were joined by an elephant right on the fence line at dinner time. It was amazing to have such a huge animal just 6 foot away from us and not be scared.
Once dinner was done, as we were washing up we could hear thunder in the distance. A storm was approaching and as we headed into the caravan the hyena started whooping. Whilst we watched TV we got a real battering from the storm with wind and rain but luckily there were no leaks still. It’s like a different caravan.Læs mere