April 25, 2025
Our first morning safari of the trip! We left the lodge just after sunrise at 6:30am. The kids complained they were tired and wanted to nap on the truck but as soon as we got going, the air woke them up and they stopped complaining. We headed east this morning to explore a new area of the reserve.
For the second day in a row, Ollie was constantly singing the same line, “When are these colonies gonna riiiiiise up” from Hamilton. He says it over, and over like a chant. To noone in particular.
It was the perfect day for Len to sit up front as co-pilot to Joe. We learned that this season was the rainiest at the reserve in 25 yrs, so waterfalls are forming out of the middle of mountains and many roads are heavily flooded. There were more than 20 “boat mode” opportunities which delighted Len.
Despite his earlier protests of fatigue, Ollie is quite the chatterbox in the morning. When not humming or singing Hamilton songs, he is asking questions. Some are on topic about Africa or animals, some about Hamilton and some out of left field. This morning he asked me, “What are the 50 states?” I told him we’d talk about it later but he starts to list them, “Alabama, Arkansas….what next?” and we repeated that we would talk about it later after begging him to stop. We’re grateful to have a third target (Joe) for some of these questions during this stop of the trip.
After a slow slow start for animal sightings, we saw a male kudu with a small limp. Joe told us a story of years ago he was working on a muddy reserve and they found a giraffe with 2 broken legs from being stuck in the mud. He shared that his team put the giraffe out of its misery which led to a conversation with Ollie about how sometimes suffering is worse that dying. This naturally led to an onslaught of additional questions that felt aggressive for both the time of day and for Ollie’s age, but we did our best.
Len has taken to calling everyone “mon ami” (my friend in French) which he picked up from one of the Despicable Me movies. Its one of his cuter obsessions but endlessly confuses our guide.
We parked in a small opening for coffee and morning snacks. Joe picked up a poop pellet, put it into his mouth and spit it a good distance away. The kids were shocked and loved this. Joe told us that if you brought up impala poop to any South African, most will then brag about how far they can spit the pellet from their mouth.
The most interesting sighting of the morning wasn’t an animal, but some bones. We spotted a piece of an elephant femur off the side of a trail and Joe then searched around for some other pieces. We found the other end of the femur and also the skull. Per Joe, the elephant had likely been dead for a year or more.
After three and a half hours of morning safari, we returned to the lodge for breakfast and some down time. Ollie spotted a few giant (6 inches!) praying mantises by the pool and had quite the shock when one jumped onto him. Not typically afraid of bugs, this surprise got the best of him and he shrieked like I do when we see giant spiders.
Kyle and the kids played in the pool for a bit and we had a small lunch before heading out again for the afternoon.
As soon as we got into the truck, Joe received word that another guide spotted a leopard nearby. He sped there as quickly as possible and we were lucky to arrive in time to see the big cat calmly lounging on a tree branch directly next to the path. We learned this leopard is called Rhulani which is Tsonga for “to be peaceful”. Apparently this was a rarity as the sighting caused Joe to whip out his huge, professional looking camera for a few shots.
Len was exhausted from the long day but held it together for the leopard sighting. He soon laid down across our laps, though, and slept for the next 90 minutes missing a fair amount of action. We drove on from the leopard to look for lions. We again spotted the alpha from the pride we saw the other day laying in the grass. A truck from our lodge was also nearby the lion and ended up getting stuck in some deep mud. Ollie was entertained watching multiple trucks and methods deployed to pull the truck out of the deep mud. Eventually, the efforts were successfully and all the trucks from our lodge made their way to a large clearing where there was a group happy hour/sundowner gathering.
En route to sundowners, we spotted an African Buffalo. We learned from Joe that “the big 5” safari animals are rhino, lion, leopard, buffalo and elephant. On hearing this, Ollie noted that we had seen 4 of the big 5 all this afternoon. We were then pulling for an elephant to complete our big day.
The boys were thrilled to practice shooting their slingshots and even invited a few other kids from our lodge to join them. I think Ollie and Lenny demolished a huge bowl of popcorn the lodge team had brought to feed the entire group. They also made a special request to Joe for 2 apple juices each at happy hour and were thrilled when he came through tonight.
We didn’t see an elephant on safari but were excited to see 6 drinking from the swimming pool tonight. We learned that all of these elephants were kicked out of their previous pods for some reason and then joined together to form a pod of misfit elephants.
The lodge had a special dinner planned tonight with a buffet of local foods including Chakalaka and pap that we tried back in Cape Town. There was also local music and dancing that the boys declined to join in on. But as soon as the dancing stopped, both were emotional with regret over not joining in. Since we were all seated in a circle around a huge fire, we sat Joe in between the boys and he fielded a great deal of inquiries during the meal.
