Nwaswitshaka

We were awake at 4am but didn’t get up until 4:45am. Today was moving day and we have a pretty good routine going where I make teas and coffee while Ellie gets dressed then goes to the bathroom. When she gets back I go to the bathroom and then we drink coffee while Ellie packs up the mattresses and sleeping bags and then I get in the tent and sort all the wires out. While I’m in the tent Ellie is loading the kitchen stuff bag into the slide outs and once I’m out with the electrical bag we load all the bedding into the back of the camper. Then we finish our drinks, put the tables and chairs back in and pull the stakes up for the tent. It’s a pretty easy tent as it all just folds in on itself with a fly sheet over the top. This morning we beat our previous best time by 10 minutes and we were leaving Satara Camp for the last time. This had been a great camp and we’d had some great sightings.
Ellie wanted to see what Skukuza Camp looked like as we should have been staying there but cancelled and we took a very slow game drive 90 kilometres there, stopping on route at the T’Shokwane picnic area for breakfast jaffels, which are basically a South African toastie but round. We didn’t see anything on route to write about, it was all the usual suspects of impala and zebra and even they were very few.
At 11am we arrived at Skukuza Camp, this is the largest of all the camps in the Kruger and even has its own airport. It used to also have its own train station that was built for the gold rush of 1929 but has since been decommissioned and now the train and carriages stand on the old railway bridge. All of the carriages have now been converted into sleeping and guest quarters and for £850 a night you can stay in one. We would have to settle for a tent.
We stopped for lunch at Skukuza in the old railway station and didn’t think we’d missed much by cancelling our nights here and staying at Satara. Skukuza is like a small town.
At 1pm we hit the road again stopping at a watering hole where there were no big animals but we did find dwarf mongoose with babies.
Back onto tarmac we had 40 kilometres of driving to do and as I rounded a corner there were 8 cars sitting at the roadside.
As we crept up behind them we could see vultures circling and coming down. We knew there was a kill. We crept up so as not to disturb the vultures and pulled in behind the last car to see 100’s of vultures eating something. At first we couldn’t see what it was but then the vultures started fighting and as they jumped up we saw a dead hyena. It was a pretty gruesome sight but the vultures would pick it clean within an hour. Nothing here is waisted.
We swiftly moved on and didn’t see anything else to note except for where 2 of the road bridges had been completely washed away by flood waters and we were diverted off road down into the river bed and then back onto the road. The gaps in the tarmac where the bridges had been were massive. It’s amazing the power of nature. We finally arrived at Lower Sabie Rest Camp at 2pm and checked in.
We are only here for one night so we found a camp spot and pitched our tent, just staking the main tent and fly and not bothering with the guide lines this time. The ground here is just like concrete and for every hole I had to make a pilot hole with the pegs we brought before using the crappy pegs that came with the tent.
Once pitched my first stop was the shop for beer, ice cold, because I was sweating like anything after doing the tent. Then we came back to camp, got the chairs and table out and just started to relax when Ellie started talking to our neighbours with a trailer tent. The next thing we were getting another guided tour of tents and trailers and how everything works.
After the chat Ellie wanted to use the Wi-Fi in the restaurant to see how much the trailer tents are but the Wi-Fi was useless here and we ended up spending 2 hours talking to a man from Zimbabwe and his wife who now live in Australia.
When we get back to England I’m going to buy a very short lead and attach Ellie to it whenever she leaves the house.
We got back to camp at 5pm. Now it was beer time and a chance to relax. We decided not to do an evening game drive as it had got very humid and the sky looked like it could rain and we’d spent 8 hours driving today.
At 6pm we had Ellie’s lunch of cold pizza for dinner and then we just chilled out at camp until it got dark and we went to bed.Read more