Sabi Sands / Singita

Executive Summary

• Big 5 plus some - check

• Baby leopard in tree and elephant in must are the 2 highlights from these 3 days

• Greeted by an elephant having breakfast the 2nd morning...5 metres from the room.

• A beautiful setting in which to have my first safari experience - Ahhhhh Singita Ebony Lodge!

• Current career thoughts - South Africa-based game reserve staff

Well Ok it's technically May 1st so I really need to be brief about the rest of South Africa so this can be a proper blog and not some kind of retrospective. Let's dot point the rest of the trip out and catch up to modern day shall we...

Staying at Singita resort in Sabi Sands, which is a private game reserve next to Kruger with unfenced borders between the two. Words cannot emphasise how spectacular the Singita Ebony Lodge is...I'm not even sure the pictures do it justice. Not knowing what to expect, we were met by one of the lodge staff plus our game ranger, Marc, who would be our ranger for the duration of the stay. The car was whisked away (god knows how they got it to turn off, but evidently the South Africans are more skilled at keyless ignitions than this Australian-American...or is it American-Australian?) and our baggage magically disappeared towards the room, as we were invited to sit down and have a drink (gin and tonic please!!) and sign waivers about it not being their fault if we're eaten by lions.

There were a few rules about staying at the lodge, which we were to learn have good reasons behind them later on. The first is that under no circumstances were we to leave our room escorted before/at dawn or after dusk. If we wished to leave our room we were to ring for a porter to collect us. The second was that we weren't to wander off the paths that led from the room to the main lodge or go for a walk by ourselves. I'm sure there were some others that were included in the Waiver About Being Eaten By Lions Not Being Their Fault, but those were the big ones. Reason being - we were on a property that was for all intents & purposes unfenced, save an electrified elephant fence (really more a suggestion to the elephants than an actual deterrent, as we were to find out later on).

Too tired to go on a mini-game drive that evening (a move I desperately regret in retrospect) we retired to the room and freshened up with a dip in the private plunge pool. Did I mention the mini-bar was also completely included in all fees already paid? After a stressful drive involving potholes, wrong turns, goats, pedestrians, cows, and 4wd tracks the Reinertsen family hit it with reasonable strength.

That evening we were collected by a porter to attend a braai in the duomo (or domo, I'm not sure as I'm now in Florence and it's all about duomos here). This is the South African equivalent of a luau but they put it in on style (mmmm braised oxtail!). Marc the game driver ate with us and it was here that I realised that South African game park hospitality staff may just be an untapped resource of single men. Sadly I was somewhat too intoxicated to make use of that new bit of information but I'm sure there was something in the Waiver About Being Eaten By Lions Not Being Their Fault that also involves not flirting with the staff (or vice versa).

Ahem, anyway.

Safe to say the first game drive came quite early at 5am wake up call, 5:30 pick up (South African Hangover #1). It was just the 3 of us, plus Marc and Jibulani (or Jabulani, I can't remember) the tracker who was part of the Shangaan people (ok I could just be making that word up but it's close), the indigenous people of the Kruger area. Jibulani's father taught him the ways of the bush, who was taught by his father, and so on. Marc loads up the rifle (er...whoa...), Jibulani hops on his seat at the front of the bonnet, and off we went on the Land Rover not knowing exactly what to expect.

We cross the river - hardcore 4WD crossing, not that pansy-ass stuff I was doing in the Audi over 8 inches of water the previous day - and drive for a bit until Marc stops the car and Jibulani gets in the vehicle. They turn around with a big grin on their face and say "this is a good thing". Marc pulls off the track and into the bush, mowing over shrubs and tall grass on the way. We come to a large tree and all of a sudden...

FLASH...SPOTS....

(that was the best I could think of to describe it)

I'm not ashamed to say that, being my first game drive, I hid in my mother's sleeve and exclaimed something to the tune of 'Oh! f***!'

It was a mother leopard and her cub. Not 10 or 15 metres from the 4WD was the leopard, and it was absolutely incredible. The cub jumped in the tree and we watched him for a good 10 minutes as he posed for us, mesmerised over how real and how close it was. They ducked into the thicket and we drove around to have a look from the other side, where mama leopard got in the tree and looked suitably blasé about us being there. (I have several pictures which could be on those cheesy posters of cute animals that people for some reason buy (e.g. "I need a holiday" or "just 'lion' around" - that one's for you Michele!)). Then the cub emerged from the thicket and played with mum in front of the 4WD for another 5-10 minutes.

This was about the point that I became completely hooked on game drives.

The rest of the morning we saw cape buffalo, impala (when impala were still exciting), hippo, zebra and wildebeast. It seemed like every time we turned the corner there was something else hanging about. Marc gave us lots of interesting animal kingdom-style facts but I don't remember any of them because I was too busy working out my camera through trial and error - figuring if I took a photo of the same subject on several different aperture/shutter speed combinations I would eventually get something halfway decent. Thankfully this theory was relaxed as the days went on because, frankly, I can't be bothered sorting through 800 photos of the same goddamn zebra but also can't bear to throw any of them away in case that's the one that would make me a famous photographer. Or, in the case of the leopards, are too cute to delete so they will forever take up hard drive space.

(You'll note that I have significantly culled the animal photos for you, though I can send the other 799 photos of my Zebra Series on request. Some are even in focus)

The rest of the day we had a relaxing time by the pool, where elephants were grazing across the river, followed by a game drive that evening. By the end of it we had seen 4 of the big 5 Day 1 and a glimpse of a rare (for those parts) cheetah in the tall grass at dusk.

The following day we had a 5:30 wake up call (winter rules) and when the porter collected us at 6, we were somewhat surprised to see a very large male elephant having breakfast on a tree 5 metres from our front door! As we cautiously walked past him (and the remenants of his other meals, just quietly) I tried to snap a few photos, but in my morning haze I didn't realise the night functions were still on the camera so...needless to say the photos aren't of best quality.

On the two drives that day we saw 3 male lions sleeping, lots of giraffe, more rhino, and a massive herd of cape buffalo surrounding our vehicle. But the highlight was the evening drive in which we saw a bull elephant in must walking around expressing his restlessness in various ways. We kept our distance, as they can be unpredictable we're told, but followed it for a good half hour as he displayed his manliness for us, excreted some sort of reproductive substance (which I reckon smells like marijuana but no one else seemed to agree with me), rubbed his tusks on a tree, then broke off the tree trunk. I was still in my trial-and-error phase of photography practice so have enough photos to do almost a time-lapse series of this elephant's movements for the time we followed him.

During the last evening game drive we turned a corner and the lodge had set out several lanterns in a clearing, with champagne and nibbles for the group to enjoy. Truly a magical and unforgettable experience!