I’ve just arrived back home again after another fantastic trip to the Kruger National Park, this time to participate in the Napi Wilderness Trail along with my mom, sister and brother.
Sunset on the Napi Trail
It will be a few days before I’ll be ready to tell you all about our experiences on the trail, and in the meantime will get to all the comments you’ve left while I was away and line up some more scheduled posts on interesting South African wildlife.
Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park is famous as the place where the White Rhinoceros was saved from extinction in the middle of the previous century. These animals, and their more cantankerous cousins the Black Rhinoceros, still occur in healthy populations at Hluhluwe-Imfolozi, but how sad that they again face a terrible onslaught from greedy humans for their horns, even here in their ancestral home.
The Park is also home to the other members of the “Big 5“, although the leopards didn’t show themselves to us during this visit. We had several sightings of different lion prides lazing on sandbanks in the Black Umfolozi River, and we encountered elephants and buffaloes throughout the reserve on a daily basis. Spotted Hyenas were a regular sight around Mpila, and we were thrilled by an encounter with a small pack of African Wild Dogs hunting impalas near Bhekapanzi Pan. That same morning we also had a fleeting sighting of a cheetah on Sontuli Loop. Furthermore, baboons, vervet and samango monkeys, duiker, bushbuck, nyala, kudu, waterbuck, wildebeest, hippo, zebra, giraffe and warthog all put in appearances as we explored Hluhluwe-Imfolozi this winter.
As we wrap up this report from our winter holidays in the bush, we really hoped you enjoyed travelling through Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park with us, and perhaps feel inspired to visit for yourself!
Being one of our favourite destinations, we’ve featured Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park many times on our blog – have a look through all our posts about this special wilderness if you’d like to learn more about it.
The Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park supports over 400 species of birds, many of which have become exceedingly rare, even threatened, outside formal conservation areas like this.
Bird-watching along the reserve’s road network is very rewarding, and there’s always something of interest at the three hides located at waterholes around the Park, or at the picnic sites set in beautiful locations along the Hluhluwe and Black Umfolozi Rivers. It is in the camps however, among the accommodation units, that the birds are most accustomed to a human presence and easiest to photograph as they go about their feathery business.
Enjoy this gallery showing some of the 73 species of bird we managed to identify during our recent winter visit to Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park.
Being one of our favourite destinations, we’ve featured Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park many times on our blog – have a look through all our posts about this special wilderness if you’d like to learn more about it.
Moving along to the latter half of our winter holidays in the bush brings us to another of Africa’s oldest conservation areas (and another of our favourite wild places) – the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park.
This conservation area covers an enormous 960km² of beautifully unspoilt wilderness, and incorporates the Hluhluwe and Umfolozi Game Reserves that were officially proclaimed in 1895.
We spent four nights in the Park – 3 in cottage #17 at wonderfully wild Mpila and the last in chalet #42 at the Park’s flagship tourist facility; Hilltop.
Of course no visit to a Game Reserve would be complete without plentiful encounters with wild creatures, so let’s get started with a few small critters we came across (more to follow in the next two days).
Being one of our favourite destinations, we’ve featured Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park many times on our blog – have a look through all our posts about this special wilderness if you’d like to learn more about it.
Time to wrap up the photographic trip report of our recent visit to the Eastern Shores of Lakes St. Lucia, with a gallery of some of the larger animals we encountered on land and sea in the place of miracles and wonders – the iSimangaliso Wetland Park.
Follow the links for more of our posts about St. Lucia town, Cape Vidal and Mission Rocks.
On the Eastern Shores of Lake St. Lucia, the amazing diversity of life forms comes in all sizes. The star of this collection of photos showcasing some of the smaller creatures that crossed our path on our recent visit must be the tiny frog that somehow got into my mug while we were enjoying coffee and rusks one morning at Mziki viewpoint near Mission Rocks. Exactly when it got into my coffee is unclear – I had put my mug down a few times to take pictures – and I have no idea how much of my coffee I had shared with the little guy. Joubert only noticed it sitting in the cup when I took my last swig as we started packing up to leave. Lucky for it, I drink a lot of milk in my coffee so it wouldn’t have been scalded.
Follow the links for more of our posts about St. Lucia town, Cape Vidal and Mission Rocks.
The iSimangaliso Wetland Park is a bird-watcher’s paradise – 526 bird species have been recorded within its borders!
During the few days we recently spent on the Eastern Shores of Lake St. Lucia, we managed to tick 109 kinds of birds, and had we been better at identifying the “Little Brown Jobs” our list would undoubtedly have been quite a bit longer still.
This incredible diversity is surely due to the Park’s rich variety of habitats, and our “success” in connecting with so many kinds of birds can only be ascribed to the terrific collection of roads, hides, picnic sites and other localities so easily accessible to visitors.
We hope you enjoy this sample of iSimangaliso’s birdlife!
Follow the links for more of our posts about St. Lucia town, Cape Vidal and Mission Rocks.
We’re fresh back from a terrific holiday in two very special wild places in northern Kwazulu-Natal. Our first destination was the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, and specifically the Eastern Shores of Lake St. Lucia, where we spent one night at Manzini Chalets in the holiday town of St. Lucia, and four nights in a log cabin at Cape Vidal.
I can’t think of a better way to start off the report back on our trip than with a few landscape photos that illustrates why iSimangaliso is a land of “miracles and wonders”, and one of our favourite destinations!
Follow the links for more of our posts about St. Lucia town, Cape Vidal and Mission Rocks.
We’ve just arrived back home after a wonderful ten days in the bush, visiting the iSimangaliso Wetland Park and Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in South Africa’s Kwazulu-Natal Province.
While we get busy responding to the comments you left on the scheduled posts that published in our absence, here’s a small gallery of what you can expect when we report back on our trip in the coming days…
At the end of April, we had the privilege of visiting the Kruger National Park with a wonderful group of friends; altogether 21 adults and children from 5 families and by far the biggest group we’ve ever accompanied to the Park! Our base for the four nights was the camping area at Satara Rest Camp, allowing us to introduce our friends to many of our favourite places in the central section of the Park.
A wonderful group of friends enjoying the scenery at Nwanedzi
Our previous visit to the Satara area was in the winter holidays of 2016, at the height of one of the worst droughts on record in South Africa. What a pleasure seeing the region transformed into a sea of lush green vegetation now at the end of the summer rainfall season, and experiencing a few of the final showers rolling over the Lowveld before winter sets in!
Of course the dense vegetation made game-viewing very tricky, and in stark contrast with our visit last year when there seemed to be predators resident at every one of the few remaining pools of water, we really had to work hard to find the meat-eaters for which Satara is so famous on this visit. We don’t consider ourselves “Big-5” chasers, but when you’re introducing a couple of newbies to Kruger’s wonders you do want her to put her best foot forward, and luckily Satara remained true to her reputation as one of the best game-viewing areas in the Park. Even if the predators kept us in suspense at their appearance, there were still a myriad of other species of game to be found in good numbers and keeping us enthralled on our drives, and even in camp! Of course, we expected to find high concentrations of plains zebra, blue wildebeest and giraffe roaming the central plains, but we were very surprised to find so many elephants around Satara!
For anyone looking for birds, Kruger could never disappoint, however on this visit the Park seemed to be bursting at the seems with feathered inhabitants even more than usually. We’ve shown you the enormous flocks (rather swarms!) of queleas in an earlier post, but notably we’ve also seen bigger flocks of marabou stork and wattled starling on this trip than ever before – no doubt in response to an eruption of food in the form of grass-seeds and the insects that feed on it.
At the end of our stay we had to contend with every camper’s worst nightmare – having to break up camp in pouring rain! They say that any friendship that survives going on holiday together will remain standing come what may, and happily it seems despite the hardships of dripping wet, muddy bodies and thoroughly soaked camping equipment, our friendship with the Bernards, Krugers, Nels and Therons have come through the tribulations with flying colours.
Camping at Satara, Kruger National Park, April 2017 – click the image for an enlarged view
(If you’d like to find out more about Satara and surrounds, have a look at the dedicated blog post we published about this popular part of the Kruger National Park)
DeWetsWild 