30th Skukuza Continued
Our breakfast turned more into a bacon and egg sarmie brunch as we had got back into camp later than expected.
The Cow started the potato salad for the braai later, while I got the fire ready so that all we had to do was light it. I then roped in some rats to assist with a portable light rigging mission in the boma, but after fiddling around for half an hour I just hung it with a stretchy from a beam before it became a victim of another temper tantrum. (I was on Predisone steroids for my stomach ulcers for the first few days in Kruger and the side effects are a very short fuse and that’s a problem when it’s not a very long fuse to begin with, so the family heads for the hills when I’m on it).
At around 3:30pm I was confident that all the boxes were ticked for the Penny/Bobby braai later, so the afternoon drive planning started. The weather had improved also and the sun was poking its head out, so jackets got packed away. (However this was short lived as the real bad weather arrived during the night).
The H4-1 and H1-2 area seemed rather quiet besides a few lion just outside camp which was causing a massive roadblock, so we decided to head down the H1-1/H3/Biyamiti loop to the weir and then back on the S114.
The H1-1/H3 only produced some of the normal gang but at the Biyamiti loop turn off some lion briefly popped their heads up.
Biyamiti loop was scenic as per normal and throughout the loop ellies and buffalo were popping up in the riverbed, but just before the weir 3 males lions appeared in the riverbed and there wasn’t a single car around so we spent around 15 minutes alone with them.
The weir produced the normal bird gang for the Cow, ellies, buffalo, giraffe, etc and a large croc very close to the road below the weir so Hawkeyes plotted a rather unique pic.
I drove across the weir, turned and headed back towards Skukuza on the S114, but around 3km later hit the brakes as familiar ears popped up next to the road.
We were stoked as we hadn’t seen dogs during our July trip due to their denning season and there was only 1 other car parked off with them, so I slowly cruised past the dogs, turned and parked next to the other car so that we didn’t have his car in our pics and vice versa.
The dogs got comfortable as we weren’t on top of them which is what would happen on any normal tar road in the south, so the junior teenagers started to cruise around.
To be continued