Thank you again to all of you who have been following faithfully from the beginning, and to those who have joined recently.
I apologize in advance if my narrative gets a bit sloppy on this episode. Fridays are usually my longest days. I left for work at 0500 and got home at 2300. It is now almost midnight and I'm seeing double. But, I have sweeter dreams when I'm thinking about Africa and Kruger, so here goes....
Day 7 Part 2 - The Road to Tshokwane:So after our Early Morning Drive we decided to drive south to Tshokwane for lunch. We had to be back to camp by 1400 hours for a mini meet with WendyA, Heksie, Cheetah2111, Porridge and Jaxiedean.
We got on the road and the first part of the drive was fairly quiet. The weather became gray and gloomy with intermittent rain. Our first sighting was this European Roller.

And then an Elephant is the river bed

I can't even walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, but this guy could walk and chew a whole tree....Impressive!
As we neared the Sweni Bridge a few cars were stopped on the side of the road. We were told that there was a Cheetah in the long grass. I'm thinking there is no way we are going to see Cheetah again. But, we certainly did. There was one lone Cheetah probably about 50 meters off the road in the long grass.

There was a lot of greenery in the way and it was difficult to get a good view.
As is often the case you can sit looking through the viewfinder forever and have no activity or movement. Then as soon as you look away, something happens.....
All of a sudden the Cheetah was up and the next thing I knew she picked up a small antelope she must have killed earlier, dragged it under a bush and started munching away. I got two pictures as proof. Both are terrible, but this is the best of the two.

And this is what she looked like at the breakfast table.

Unfortunately when she went down to eat she was almost invisible in the grass. We stayed for a little while hoping she would move, but no such luck this time. Trust me, I'm not complaining. We surely had our share of good luck.
I'm calling this one "she", because I think it was the female from last night's sighting. After we left her, we crossed the bridge hoping to see the Lion, but they had moved on. However, about 50 meters beyond the bridge, the three male Cheetah were lying in the grass. All you could see was an ear twitch every so often so we didn't stay long and I didn't bother taking a picture. Kind of funny, because a few days earlier I would have taken a hundred shots of the ear. I didn't feel the need after the great sightings we had.
We continued along and saw Zebra and Giraffe



After a while we came across three or four cars stopped on the side of the road. A gentleman told us there was a Leopard in a tree. The gentleman was the same guy who had told us about the Leopard the prior night where all we could see was the tail. This guy had a knack for being able to spot LIT's. In fact deamole said he wanted to spend a couple hours driving with the guy to learn his technique.
We eventually found the Leopard, but he was far off and we couldn't really get a good angle. Most of my shots have a branch blocking his face and this is about the best I could get.

We watched for a while and he moved around in the tree. After about 20 minutes he climbed down and disappeared. All of the shots of him climbing down were obscured by bushes that were between us and him.
We had been told about a large pride of Lion that was lounging around one of the waterholes yesterday, so we were hoping they would have found it a nice place to come back to. They apparently didn't, but we did have some good sightings of Waterbuck and a surfing Heron


We continued on to Tshokwane with no further excitement. In had a Kudu doors roll that was really good. I also had a melk tart, but I remembered it being made fresh at Tshokwane. All they had this time was a packaged variety. I must admit it was still really good.
Stay tuned for the drive back to Satara.....
Daron