All Creatures

All creatures great and small, fat and tall, our Lord God loves them all, or does that song go otherwise. Anyway on the very last day of the year, we did another early morning start. This time we left from our base in Nelspruit and headed for Numbi, the closest gate into the Kruger National Park armed only with our cell phones’ cameras.

It was a cool start but we knew that the temperatures would hit 40 degrees Celsius so we packed lots of water. At first the animals were scarce but we camped out at every watering hole between Pretoriuskop and Skukuza. The heat forced the animals to the watering holes with even the rhinoceroses preferring to wallow in the water as if they wished to become hippopotamuses.

We saw mostly Impala followed hot on their tails were the rhinos. Yes we were blessed to see lots of these endangered animals but towards the end of the day all we wanted was to see some elephants and then we nearly drove into two large males bulls as we round a dirt track that lead to another watering hole. These two must have opened the flood gates as it was elephants we wanted, we got plenty.

The crowning point of our trip was at the very end, near Malelane on another dirt track along the Crocodile River. The Leopard just caught a monkey in front of us and calmly proceeded to walk past us carrying it’s dinner, much to the disgust of the other monkeys who stayed well back in the trees barking at the leopard.