Mahlatini Travel Blog

My 3 week trip to South Africa finished with a 4 day Safari in the Eastern Cape split between two game reserves.

The first reserve was Amakhala game reserve which is a really easy to find as it is just off the N2. I had the pleasure of staying at two different lodges whilst there. The only problem was the Eastern Cape was having its heaviest rains in 5 years!

I made it up to Woodbury lodge and was warmly greeted by the manager. The suites are great with your own private deck for viewing. At this stage my biggest worry was getting out on the game drives with the wet weather. I met my rangers Amy and Claire and they weren’t worried at all! Their attitude was “I am game if you are” We threw on our rain proof gear and headed off.

I soon realised I had been worrying about nothing. The rain had brought on new grass which had brought out the animals. Straight off we saw a ‘tower’ of Giraffe, a herd of zebra and two fabulous rhino! Though it was wet we had a great laugh and had lots of sightings.

That night we had a great dinner around a big table with everyone at the lodge. The food was amazing and maybe we had too much wine but we were in bed early enough for our morning drive. The morning was a little wet but not as bad as the day before and the reserve was so green which was great for the grazing animals. Again lots of giraffe and zebra but also a lot of different antelope which I had never seen before such as the Eland.

That afternoon I transferred to Amakhala Safari lodge and to my new ranger. It was only 20mins down the road so not too much of a drive at all. The best thing was the rain had stopped, the sun had appeared and it was a beautiful day. I quickly dropped my bags in my room, met my fellow guests and off we headed on the next game drive. By some strange coincidence they were all Irish like me so we had loads to talk about.

Again lots of zebra and giraffe but a lot more as well. Ostrich, elephant, and rhino all with in the first hour of your drive, the best thing being they all had little babies with them. We spent a fair amount of time with them before heading off for our sun downers. We found a great spot for a drink looking down over the whole 7000 hectares – absolutely beautiful!

Again that night we had great meal as a group and a few glasses of wine too, well you know what they say about the Irish….

On the morning drive we decided to look for the Lions, Amakhala Reserve has only two at the moment but it is looking to increase its pride and are hoping that the lioness is already pregnant. It took us sometime to find them but when we found them they were very impressive. At one stage we lost the big male, as we looked for him we realised he was just 2m to our left beside the Land Rover. Once he knew we knew he was there he got up to show us his size and he was definitely a big boy and fairly intimidating!

After that bit of excitement we headed off to the flat plains to see what we could see. This was to be better sighting than the lions, well in my opinion anyway. We found a female cheetah with her 5 cubs all about 11 months old teaching them to hunt. They were play fighting and running after each other but at this stage they couldn’t really take anything down. The mother was definitely looking for lunch but there was nothing small enough around at the time. At one stage the young cubs did make a run for a Kudu but stopped after a disapproving look from their mother. They look so cute you nearly forget they are natural born killers, it was very tempting to get out of Land Rover and give them a pet,
but I thought better of it!

I could have sat with them for hours but I had to head on to get to my next reserve. The last two days were great and I met some lovely people, it was going to be hard to beat!

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