The rest of Londolozi

We’ve now arrived in Zambia so I should try to finish up writing about Londolozi. Our internet access is still pretty bad, so I’ll just write and upload pictures as I can.

Londolozi is a private game reserve attached to the Kruger reserve, which is a huge fenced in area for wildlife that straddles the borders of several countries, but is primarily in South Africa. The main attraction there is of course, the wildlife, which is why the schedule revolved around the twice daily game drives.  While we were there, we had great encounters with just about everything there was to see.

There were lots of elephants, giraffes, a number of rhinos, plenty of hippos, a couple of lions, three leopards, and plenty more. Spectacularly colorful birds were also quite plentiful.

The second day we were there, we were treated with a herd of elephants hanging out in the river in front of the camp for a few hours. We sat on our deck watching them munch away with a glass of wine. It was just amazing.

The third night we were there, we came back to our room after the evening drive to find that they’d set up a private dinner on our deck, decorated our room with rose petals and setup a bubble bath. They really make every day special.

We’d also gotten to see lions at a kill that evening. A pride of female lions and some cubs had taken down a water buffalo earlier that day. They had plenty of time to fill up before we got there, several of them were napping on the buffalo to protect it from other animals. When they did decide they wanted a bite, they would jostle around for position with each other, particularly the cubs.

The next morning we drove up to a hyena den and luckily they were all still up and about. There were about 10 hyenas there, mostly young ones, and they were quite active playing with each other. At one point one was dragging around a set of impala horns taunting the others with it. They behaved a lot like dogs, but apparently they are more closely related to cats. The rest of the morning was relatively uneventful, we were searching for a black rhino, whose tracks had been spotted on the property earlier, but we never found it.

The evening’s game drive was also relatively uneventful, there were the usual sightings, but nothing too out of the ordinary. We stopped to look at a lot of birds, since we didn’t have any particular query in mind this time. When it came time for the usual sunset break for drinks, we turned a corner to find that they had setup a candlelight bar with drinks and snacks for our truck overlooking the river. The camp manager Will was there to greet us, and we had a lovely time. They never missed an opportunity to do something special and unexpected.

Unfortunately, that was our last night there, and our flight the next morning had been replaced by an earlier road transfer due to weather, so sadly we didn’t get a morning game drive.