TUESDAY, APR 13TH, LEOPARD HILLS PRIVATE GAME RESERVE

Another beautiful day here in Kruger Park. Began our morning game drive again at 6am and watched a beautiful sunrise while searching for animal tracks. Shortly after sunrise another camp's safari vehicle found a pride of 7 lions lying in a dry, sandy stream bed. So we headed that way and found 2 male lions, 3 female lions, 2 very small cubs, and 1 larger cub. Our guide drove to a good photo taking position about 25 feet from them. It is amazing that the animals are not frightened of the vehicles and trust us to be so close to them. Our guide insists that we remain seated at all times though. We spent about 15 minutes observing them before letting another vehicle come up. There were at least 4 land rovers there to take photos but only two at a time was up close. Next we found 4 hippopotamus mostly submerged in a pond that was to far for good photos. Plus we could only see their heads occasionally. Then the call came over the radio that a young leopard was spotted lying on top of a huge ant hill (ant hills here are 3 to 10 feet high) and was stalking a herd of impalas and heard of blue wildebeest. Once again Marius positioned the vehicle about 10 feet from the very beautiful leopard. I got a lot of great photos and even took some video with my camera for the first time. We were there quite a while. The leopard rarely took his eyes off of the herd of impala about 300 yards away. It knew we were there, obviously, but did not care about us. Our tracker was sitting on front on the land rover and was really close to it. I noticed he had the spotlight in his hand and that was his weapon if the leopard pounced on him. We were so close that it could have happened in a split second as the leopards are really fast. But it did not mind us or the other camp's land rover at all. It finally moved slowly so the impala would not see it to a fallen tree and just laid out on it. More camp's showed up so we had to move on to let everyone see this. The wildebeests would not let us too close but got some photos of them. Again today we saw many herds of impala. After stopping by a pond for some coffee or tea and some chocolate muffins, we headed back towards the lodge. This is a big place so took a while to get back. On the way we saw two big African Fish Eagles. They are similar to our bald eagles. Then not far from the lodge we came up behind two bull rhinoceros walking down the road (not really a road just path that the safari land rovers use). Once again we got pretty close to them but they were too busy eating the grass that they cared less about us. Yesterday's rhino was a huge one (approx 5000 lbs) and this was HIS territory. These two were only about 3000 lbs and Marius said if the big one found these guys in his territory there would be a big fight. We arrived back at the lodge at 9:30 for our awaiting breakfast. One other couple will be arriving at 1pm today so then there will be 6 of us on the evening game drive. We told Marius we wanted to find some elephants and water buffalo this evening. I have lots of great photos of lions and leopards already but they are neat to see. The kudu meat I had for dinner last night was good. It is a very lean, red meat. We sat out on a big wooden patio that overlooked the watering hole and Kruger Park countryside. It was an absolutely clear night and the stars filled the sky above us. Ok, tomorrow we will do the morning game drive, have some breakfast, then they will take us to the small runway about 10 minutes from here. A small chartered plane will fly us to the Kruger Park Airport where we will catch a larger jet flight direct to the Cape Town airport. It is a 2 1/2 hour flight to CPT and will land at 4pm. A driver will be waiting to transfer us from there to the pier. Our ship is suppose to arrive at 5pm so it should be perfect timing. Will not have time to write tomorrow so letting you know our plans now.