uMngeni

The 04:45 alarm is brutal - for one of us. Vicks has not slept well, and elects to stay in bed instead of going on our morning game drive. We’ve had a pretty full on few days, including transcontinental travel, and I think she’s just tuckered. I head out though, grabbing a quick coffee before heading into the park at 05:30. As I’m on my own, Lymon suggests I join another group going out. We’re still only 4 guests in the truck. My guide this morning is Noles - Umzolozolo’s chief ranger. She’s a pint-pot bundle of energy, and has the most amazing eyes for spotting game. At one point, she spots a rhino a couple of kilometres away from us. Even through my binoculars, I’m not 100% convinced it’s not a big boulder. Our game drive is pretty successful - lots of kudu, zebra and wildebeest. We see a huge male hippo having a snooze in a small lake. The sun rising over the savannah is beautiful. There’s a dewy mist in the air that the sun is desperately trying to burn through. It’s quite ethereal. We spend some time with a hunting black-backed jackal. It leaps around looking for its prey of small rodents. Utterly jaunty. We spot a small herd of Eland - one of the biggest antelopes on the planet. They’re skittish, so can ’t get too close for fear of spooking them. Around the corner, we come close to that rhino that Noles spotted earlier. He’s a big boy - recently imported into the park as part of efforts to continue to rebuild the population after decades of poaching. Poaching remains a critical threat to these majestic beasts, but the anti-poaching tactics *seem* to be working.

We receive a radio call from another jeep that two of the park’s cheetahs have been spotted to the North West of us. There are also two lions sleeping with a kill nearby. We choose to head over to the cheetah spotting, and take off at pace. We stop to say hi to some giraffe, and after 15 minutes of being thrown around the back of the truck, arrive to find two cheetahs with very fat bellies snoozing after a kill. There’s still some blood around their mouths, so fresh is the kill. We spend 20 minutes with them, swapping between the naked eye, binoculars and the camera on my iPhone. They’re such stunning creatures - so graceful on the move. These two are going nowhere though. I flick through my photos, and the distance to the cheetahs is just too far for my phone to take decent pics. I shall draw a picture for Vicki so she doesn’t feel she’s missed out.

We stop for a bush coffee - black coffee, with a glug (technical term) of Amarula cream. Delicious. The sun’s getting properly hot now it’s 08:00. We decide to head back to the lodge for breakfast. I check in on Vicki, who’s had another nearly 4 hours of sleep, and who feels much better for it. We have a quick breakfast, hear a large warthog butchering an orphaned baby warthog (circle of life etc etc), and get ourselves packed for the next phase of our journey.Read more