Our long weekend of family fun on the shores of Loskop Dam flew past in the blink of an eye…
We’ve just returned from spending the Easter long weekend at the Loskop Dam Nature Reserve, and we’ll be telling you all about our time there in the weeks to come.
“Blur” is the theme for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge.
Our New Year’s visit to Golden Gate Highlands National Park marked the final stop on our three-week long bush holidays. For this final leg, we were joined by Marilize’s parents and my sister and brother-in law at Glen Reenen Rest Camp.
Glen Reenen, Golden Gate Highlands National Park, December 2014
This Park may have been proclaimed originally to safeguard the awesome mountain scenery, but the hills and valleys are also home to a pleasing variety of birds and animals. We found most of the game concentrated towards the east of the Park, around the Basotho Cultural Village.
Golden Gate’s magnificent scenery and hidden jewels are best enjoyed along the many walking trails traversing the area. Have a look at the posts we dedicated to the Brandwag, Echo Ravine and Mushroom Rocks walks, three shorter hikes that are ideal introductions to this mountain ecosystem.
Golden Gate Highlands National Park was another highlight of the trip and a perfect setting to conclude a wonderful holiday. Quality time spent with dear family saw us home in good spirits and strength for the year that lay in wait. And just to be sure the Park is still as beautiful as we remember it, we’ll return soon enough. We simply can’t stay away from a place this magical.
We didn’t think three weeks in the bush would fly past as quickly as it did. We started of with two nights at Chelmsford Nature Reserve, then three nights at Ithala Game Reserve, three nights at uMkhuze Game Reserve, three nights at Lake Saint Lucia, five nights in Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park, one night at Midmar Dam, and finally four nights at Golden Gate Highlands National Park. By the time we reached home back in Pretoria again, we had covered a distance of 4022km between and in some of our favourite South African wild places. An epic December bush holiday indeed.
Our route between 13 December 2014 and 3 January 2015 (map drawn from Google Maps)
If the trail to the top of the Brandwag Buttress is the most popular of Golden Gate Highlands National Park’s walks, and the Echo Ravine trail the most spectacular of the short walks radiating from Glen Reenen, then the Mushroom Rocks trail is the easiest and least demanding. And that’s a good thing, because you can concentrate on finding the little jewels hiding among Golden Gate’s flowing green grasslands and gawk at the amazing scenery without using it as an excuse to catch your breath 😉 . The only challenging section of the trail is the crossing over the Little Caledon River, especially in summer when the Park experiences most of its rainfall and even more so when lugging a couple of cameras, binoculars and water bottles along…
What better way could there be to ring in the first day of a new year than exploring new places? Especially after ending 2014 on a literal high atop the Brandwag Buttress? That’s why Marilize and I decided to undertake the Echo Ravine trail at Golden Gate Highlands National Park that day (Joubert was out exploring other pastures in Golden Gate with his grandpa), a walk we’ve not done before. We were not disappointed that we did, the scenery on the way to, and inside, the ravine is simply awe-inspiring and in our view this is one of the best short (taking an hour or two to complete) walks in the Park. It’s not an easy walk, requiring you to clamber over boulders at several stages, especially as you near the head of the ravine, but the rewards are entirely worth the effort.
We wanted to do something special to end 2014. We couldn’t think of any better way to spend the last morning of the year than getting to the top of the Brandwag Buttress, the icon of the Golden Gate Highlands National Park, even if the weather did not play along as nicely as we had hoped.
The walk to the top of the immense Brandwag (Afrikaans for “sentinel”) formation is the most popular of Golden Gate’s trails. You can walk the Brandwag route in less than an hour, but to us that would be missing the point; you have to take time to appreciate the scenery along the way and the grand views from the top. There are two routes to choose from; one starting at Glen Reenen Rest Camp and the other at the Golden Gate Hotel and Chalets, and combining the two; going up one way and down the other, really is the way to go.
The crystal clear and unquestionably fresh mountain streams at Giant’s Castle Game Reserve, in the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park
“Fresh” is the theme for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge.
There is only one way to truly appreciate the amazing diversity and breathtaking beauty of the flowers that occur in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park, and that is on any or all of the Park’s walking trails. This is a gallery of just some of the fragile blooms we enjoyed while exploring the Park during our December bush holidays.
We’ll be dedicating upcoming installments of de Wets Wild to three of Golden Gate’s easiest walking trails.
The spectacular Amphitheatre formation in the Drakensberg range is the focal point of the Royal Natal National Park.
“Wall” is the theme for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve shared with you several exciting sightings we enjoyed at Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park, during our December holidays in the bush. Time to wrap up that part of our trip now.
We left the cheese farm near Mtubatuba very early in the morning of the 24th of December, and made it to the Memorial Gate just in time for it opening at 05:00AM (it’s a drive of about 75km only). We used Memorial Gate so that we could explore the Hluhluwe-section of the reserve on our way south to Mpila Camp, where we could check in 14:00 in the afternoon.
Mpila is a favourite camp of ours. It is unfenced, except for a single strand of electric wire strung high enough to only keep out elephants and giraffes. Other wildlife, including large predators, regularly roam among the accommodation units. Visitors should keep a special eye open for raids by vervet monkeys during the day, and for hyenas at night while preparing their evening meals on the barbeque fires.
That afternoon, we went for a quick drive and had some fun with a cute white rhino calf. Hluhluwe-Imfolozi is renowned as a rhinoceros haven, and we pray that the hard work and dedication of the rangers protecting them against a terrible onslaught from armed poachers will not be in vain.
When we made our December 2014 plans a year before, we specifically wanted to spend Christmas at Mpila. A special day at a special place. We set out for a quick drive on a glorious morning, then went back to camp to prepare and enjoy Christmas lunch. In the afternoon the Park was inundated by a quick cloud burst, luckily the gravel roads are in good condition and we could continue to explore the Park soon after.
Boxing Day brought us our memorable encounter with lions in trees, but Hluhluwe-Imfolozi has much more to offer and our sightings this day was particularly varied. Our day ended with our best ever sighting of a wild African Rock Python, almost as long as the road was wide!
Every day at Hluhluwe-Imfolozi brings something special and exciting, and the 27th of December was no different. Our day started with a thrilling wild dog pack on the hunt, but that wasn’t where it ended!
Our last full day at Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park seemed to belong to the elephants, with a number of really close-up encounters, but we also had a good laugh at a hyena that bit off more than she could chew.
All too soon our five night stay at Mpila came to an end. We had collected so many memories, and can’t wait to return. Driving to Nyalazi Gate we tried to postpone our departure as long as we could, even spending half-an-hour looking for a distant pride of lions reported by fellow spotters in the kznsightings group (a group set up so that visitors to the game reserves in Kwazulu-Natal can share what they find while exploring with other visitors).
We found the lions and then departed for Midmar in the KZN Midlands.
uMkhuze Game Reserve, in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park and World Heritage Site, was the third destination of our epic summer 2014 bush holidays. We arrived at uMkhuze’s western gate, Emshopi, on the 18th of December, after an easy 164km drive from Ithala Game Reserve. Our reservation was for three nights in an extremely spacious cottage at Mantuma Rest Camp. When we say “extremely spacious”, we are not lying; you could have held a dance in the lounge!
Mantuma, uMkhuze, December 2014
We’ve already shared with you our experiences at two of uMkhuze’s biggest attractions, the Nsumo Pan and Kumasinga Hide, and in this post we’ll focus on some of the things we saw in the rest of this unique reserve.
Nsumo magic
Zebra reflections at Kumasinga
Of the bat, it has to be said that uMkhuze is one of South Africa’s best known birding destinations. The variety of birds is absolutely staggering, thanks to the diversity of habitats the reserve protects, and we were lucky to add a couple of new “lifers” to our birding tick list.
uMkhuze protects a sizable piece of sand forest, a very rare plant community in South Africa. An equally rare little antelope, the suni, lives only within this habitat. We had several sightings of them, but getting even a half-decent photograph of these shy creatures proved very difficult!
A pair of suni in the sand forest
We also had our first sightings of large predators (on this trip) at uMkhuze. Lions were reintroduced to the reserve a year ago, and we were thrilled to find two females during a guided night drive. On our last afternoon at uMkhuze, we found a very shy spotted hyena lurking in the bush.
uMkhuze protects large populations of other well-known African mammals and they certainly were not shy to show themselves!
uMkhuze has its fair share of creepy-crawlies too!
I’ve already mentioned what a diverse reserve uMkhuze is, and there’s no better place to see this than from the top of the observation tower just a few kilometers south of Mantuma Rest Camp.
uMkhuze really is a gem in the crown of South Africa’s wild places, and we always enjoy visiting here. Leaving through the Ophansi Gate on uMkhuze’s eastern boundary we felt like we should have stayed a bit longer still, thankfully we could console ourselves by thinking about the great destinations that were still waiting for us on our summer trip to the bush!
Driving into the riverine forest at Ophansi Gate
DeWetsWild 