Get ready for some photos from South Africa!!! Before I keep going I should give more background to what you are seeing. After our very long flight from DC to Ghana, Ghana to Lagos/Nigeria, Nigeria to Johannesburg, we got our rental car and drove towards the Timabavati Nature Reserve of Kruger National Park. Upon ICM's friend's recommendation, we had chosen Umlani Bushcamp (a private camp) and after suffering a flat tire within a few hours of landing, we made it to Umlani in time for our afternoon game drive!
Our schedule at Umlani was something like this - wake up knock at 5am, coffee or tea and light snack at around 5:30am, head out on our 3-hr morning drive by 5:45am, at some point later during our game drive we'd get out of the car and get more coffee/hot cocao and another breakfast snack, get back to camp and it's real breakfast time (eggs, grilled tomato slice, toasts, yogurt, fruit, rasher bacon - delish), break time until about 1ish (this was when ICM and I would go to the treehouse), then lunch at 1:30pm, 3-hr afternoon/sunset game drive at 3:00pm, before the game drive ended we'd get out of the car and have a beverage (diet coke for me, double gin and tonic for ICM), get back to camp 6ish 7 and have a cocktail around the bonfire, delicious dinner, and after dinner drink (my favorite was the Umlani coffee, Amarula!) around the bonfire...finally, bed around 9ish. It was awesome! We had originally booked for two nights but loved it so much that we extended one more night...worth every penny!
Our tracker, Elvis was super awesome (he's next to ICM in that photo above). He could look at a bird pretty far away, tell us a page number to his bird guide, and he was right every single time. One of my favorite things about him was that he loves Tupac, believes that Tupac isn't really dead, and quoted him extensively and correctly.
Decided that it'd be nice to post some bigger photos of wildlife. Here are some from Day 3.
This is an impala, they were pretty much everywhere. They look kind of delicate and you'd expect them to have softer voices, but they have this manly grunt, very strange.
Turtles on Mr.Hippo's back, took this when we were in the tree house :)
As you saw on Day 2, hundreds of buffalos came to Marco's Dam (which the tree house overlooks) when we went to the tree house. The next day while we were there, there were a group of elephants that came to play in the dam and drink water from the spring (below).
That's a leopard tortoise in the lion cub's mouth!
Day 4! Woke up with this beautiful red glow from outside and into the mosquito net, went on our last game drive at Umlani and witnessed a pretty cool battle between wild dogs and hyenas with a jackal trying to get some food without getting killed, saw a cool dung beetle (with a passenger on the dung ball who does nothing!) push up hill and demonstrate perseverance, said our goodbyes to the wonderful bush camp and drove towards Letaba - our rest camp for the night within the Kruger National Park.
Here are some photos of Umlani
This tree frog is TINY! Our tracker, Elvis found this one while driving...I have no idea how.
A warhog in Kruger!
Alright, I need to make dinner!!! Good night :)
