Long Weekends End

At last the long weekend is over, all the long weekenders packed up this morning and headed home, private school holidays have ended and the camp is back to normal.

The pensioners are now arriving, the Satara camping is full with no sites available; the difference is that there are only 2 persons on a site instead of the 6 persons per site in the holidays. The pressure is off the ablutions and the traffic jam up, at predator sightings, is a thing of the past, viewing and photography is so much better. Now our holiday really begins.

We continue to see up to 3 prides of Lion a day, but as lions do, they sleep all day and are not offering any real photo opportunities yet. This will improve as we leave earlier and the morning temperature cools down.

It seems that the very hot weather of the first 2 weeks is a thing of the past where 40C was the norm, our air conditioner worked overtime. A frontal system moved over with quite unpleasantly strong winds and it cooled the place down. I hope the normal weather of warm days and cool mornings is here to stay.

We now also have more time on our hands for painting, photography and will update the blog more often as the photos opportunities improve.

Our friendly neighbours also left today. Gavin and Shavonne and Morgan and Brandon, their 2 children who adopted us and spent a lot of time with us at our site, we shared a wonderful braai and lamb Potjie together.

How is this for a coincidence, while Kim and Peter were out on a game drive with the kids this couple arrived and looked at the site next to us, I went out and advised them that this was probably the shadiest site in Satara, I introduced myself and helped them position their off road trailer to take advantage of the shade. When Kim and Peter returned from the game drive they found that they knew each other, Stella and Morgan are at school together at Heron Bridge in grade R. and they land up camping next to us. They were great mates until Stella left, after which they continued to visit us and watch the children’s channel on our TV. 

Our list of animals seen from our Camp site so far

Hyaena, African wild Cat, Vervet monkeys, Baboon, Banded Mongoose, Zebra, Wildebees, Buffalo, Elephant, Giraffe, Impala, Dwarf mongoose Warthog.

 This is the Hyaena we have named Boytjie, he visits every night and patrols the fence hoping someone will be stupid enough to feed him

 Here is Boytjie again with a larger female Hyaena who could be the clan matriarch. Females are always larger than males and have a high status in the clan.