Blogs from Hoedspruit, Limpopo, South Africa, Africa - page 6

Day 2 Bit of a chill out today after a goodnights sleep. Still up early then a lecture about Survial in the bush. I now no that you can survive for 4 minutes without air,4 days without water and get this 32 to 44 days without food (great diet plan girls, not) also how to navigate by self if lost by finding North etc. After dinner we then went deep into the bush and joined the experienced guys that have been out here for between 2 weeks to 2 months for a night out sleeping in the bush under the stars. They had set up camp with 4 fires anon the outside and we had sleeping bags in the middle, this is so the Lions, Hyenas, Elephants and Jackels went come into camp because they wont ... read more

From Matt- Last night we went on a quest for the leopard. (not a jaguar as we said in the last blog) We just passed by all the other critters we had seen before. We found tracks of a mating pair and there were several trackers going through the bush helping. The mating pair were being very discreet! Close to dark we got a call on the radio that a leopard had been spotted several km from where we were, so we took off at breakneck speed bouncing all over the road. We slowed as we got closer and sure enough we came upon a lone male leopard! He came within about 10 feet of our vehicle and the camera was snapping away. Unfortunately I had the wrong settings on the camera! Darn these new fangled ... read more

This is the safari experience that we've been looking forward to for a long time. It's the complete opposite to our past couple of game parks where we were in an overland vechle full of 18 people. We had planned on staying at a nice tented camp at the Edeni Private Lodge, but we were surprised by a nice upgrade to one of the 5 star luxury cabins (big thanks to our travel agent!). In total we had 6 game drives on the private reserve plus a full day excursion into the Kruger National Park. We took so many pictures, but have decided to focus on the cats in this blog because we finally broke the curse (haven't seen big cats for a long time)! It was fitting that for both our first evening and our ... read more

Ecotraining Field guide level 1 training Vom 18.2. bis und mit 17.3. war ich im karongwe reserve in der naehe von hoedspruit welches westlich von krueger park liegt. Das camp liegt an einem trockenen flussbett im sueden des 9000 quadratkilometer grossen reserves welches 4 der 5 „big 5“ beinhaltet (loewe, leopard, elefant, nashorn aber keine wasserbueffel). Dort haben wir gelernt was ein natur-guide wissen muss, natuerlich auch wie man eine safari in einem fahrzeug und zu fuss fuehrt. Und das alles in englisch. Huff, das war harte arbeit denn ich war die einzige person die englisch nicht als muttersprache spricht. Nun kann ich jedenfalls eine wasserbockspur von einer kuduspur unterscheiden und den dung von nem elefanten und nem nashorn erklaeren oder der ruf eines bienenfressers erkennen. Das schwierigste fuer mich waren die 30 baeume die wir ... read more

Been a bit quiter since that crazy first week, mainly because me and my team (we have been split up into 3, 6 person teams) went to the mountains for 5 days, which was alot more chilled out than the reserve, its basically catching rodents for biodiversity studys and either going on hikes or going to the water hole to have a dip or chillout. I was ready to come back to base on tuesday in time for party night which was pretty crazy again before paint balling the next day and farting about in the pool. Which takes us upto today and my first research drive in a week (overdue) but it was worth waiting for as we walked with the cheetah brothers which means walking 10-15 feet behind them while their mobile. from the ... read more