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I LOVE it

Hi all, we are back from our fantastic trip (and I am up at 3 a.m. with crazy jet-lag ) I have over 6000 photos to sort through and we had some great sightings in KTP, although perhaps rather less than I'd hoped (no black-maned lions BB and cheetah only far in the distance.) Still, KTP is wonderful and we did see lots of birds and one great leopard sighting (came down right next to the car and the now-famous Nossob lion kill right by the road with the three cubs! Also ran into Jo and her spouse several times with her yellow plastic bag ribbon and that was a lot of fun.

And we had somewhere over 200 birds for the whole trip--many lifers and many endemics, still need to work all that out.

Will try and do a full trip report--eventually!!

Great to meet everyone and wish I could come on your birding outing

Sorry you missed on the black mane, but you got pretty much everything else!

Sounds like a great trip. Would like to hear your comments now that you have been to KNP & KTP.

I'm ruminating on it

We had a fabulous trip and if I lived in S.A. I'd surely go often to KTP. Its beautiful and the solitude and quiet were amazing..camps like Kieliekranke truly magical. But I think its a place that needs more time to be truly satisfying. In our short time I felt the pressure was on to find the big cats and while we absolutely appreciated all the small things, and the common things, and the birds of course, the predators are always the highlights. It was really quite quiet in terms of the cat sightings (notwithstanding the lion kill at Nossob.) We weren't the only ones who thought so...most folks we met, including Jo, felt it was a pretty quiet time. I think it might be attributed to the cold--even Jannie said that the cold was affecting sightings. I would surely go back in a different season, closer to summer when things might be more active and there would be more migrants and raptors. (We saw many birds, but not a large variety of species.)

Of course Kruger can be quiet too but there are just more options for roads to travel and if one area is slow you can try another, in KTP you basically have one road to travel back and forth all day long. And there is more variety of habitat and species in Kruger. Actually we didn't have many cat sightings in Kruger either...I think we actually had more in KTP, as we had that rainy week in Kruger. But there was so much else there--eles, rhino, hyena (we saw only one hyena in KTP), zebra, buffalo...etc etc.

I hope this makes sense. Really, if I lived there I'd go to both as often as possible, they are totally different and both amazing. But as a traveler who spent 30 hours getting home, not to mention a ton of $$$$, I think I'd return to Kruger first. (And I'm already thinking about a trip to northern Kruger next time...!!)