Leopards in the Bush

Many apologies to you all for the long delay in posting this chapter but we've been fairly busy since our last little adventure. At the end of January Terry and I (thanks to the hospitality and wise investments of Terry's father, George) got to spend another beautiful weekend in the Sabi Sands area of South Africa at the Ntoma lodge at the Simbambili game reserve.

As many of you have already heard myself and Terry talk about and show off pictures from this beautiful spot you are all somewhat familiar with the lodge, and there are even a few of you who have also been lucky enough to come along at some point or another. As always we had a fantastic time out there and we were lucky enough to see what Terry has termed the "big 6". Usually when one refers to the big 5 in game terms they are talking about the 5 animals that are considered the most dangerous animals in the bush (funny enough now they are the ones that you focus most on trying to find on safari) they include the Elephant, Rhino, African buffalo, Lion, and the Leopard. When Terry talks about his big 6 it is referring to the 6 different Leopards we saw on our weekend trip. Generally the Leopard is the hardest of the big 5 to spot (forgive the play on words) but the Simbambili park "specializes" in Leopard, the areas we traverse have one of the highest reported sightings of leopard in Africa. We were lucky enough to see Safari, Seseka, Salayeshi, Mfufenyan, Nyaleti, and Kurula. Most of whom were kind enough to pose nicely for the camera. We also came across a breeding herd of elephant, plenty of rhino, some very sleepy looking buffalo, zebra, giraffe, kudu, nyala, waterbuck, bushbuck, wildebeast, baboon, hippopotamus, tree frogs, chamelions, dwarf black mongoose, warthog, turtles, impala around every turn, lots of birds that I won't pretend to know a lot about and surely a few others that I have forgotten for now. The only one of the big 5 that was missing was the lion, but if you go by the word of our ranger Wicus, he did find one for us but we weren't paying enough attention to see it , due in part to the stinging downpour we were right in the middle of experiencing... After that rainout we all wised up a bit and tried to waterproof as much as possible! But despite the inclement weather both Wicus and our tracker Doctor did an amazing job of finding us all kinds of interesting game to ogle. Including a fairly rare sight, a beautiful African cannon bakkie in full bloom... Even though the 3-4 hours we spend on a drive tend to be captivating Terry and I did feel the need to stretch our legs on one of the evening drives and were luckily able to convince our ranger and tracker to play along and have a 50 meter foot race, George was kind enough to catch the whole catastrophe on camera for us. And thanks to our genial nature, either that or Wicus was trying to get rid of us a bit early, we got the privelige of tagging along with the experts as they did a search on foot for the new den site of one of the leopards, Safari and her two six week old cubs. You know its serious when your ranger (who is presently loading a large rifle) tells you that there is only one rule... that if the leopard charges you "don't run!". Fortunately or unfortunately we didn't find the leopard when we went out but two days later they were found right where we had been looking...

And as always if you didn't get enough of the photos here you can check out the whole album by clicking here: Simbambili January 2006

P.S. I was asked to officially apologise for the goofy photos of Terry in the last installment , so sorry dear. But in my defense I did ask you to check the draft before I published it so sorry for you!! I hope your appearance in this edition is more to your liking!

Much love to you all and we are looking forward to seeing you all over the next two weeks!

Genevieve