Saturday 7 October 2023

We lay in late this morning as it was still raining and the forecast did not look good.
“It will stop at 2 p.m.,” I told my grumpy husband, who wanted to pack up and go home. “We can’t go home. It’s raining there too and the road is closed!”

“Then we’ll go back to Plett.”

“No,” I said. “Let’s rather be grumpy here!” So he agreed.

We only left Sundowner’s at 10 and had breakfast at Taste of Africa. It was very good. The rain continued steadily throughout the morning. Sometimes it was light, at others, it came down quite hard making visibility poor. Just before 2 o’clock, it was still raining but at 2 p.m., on the dot, it stopped! But the roads were awful. There were periods of no rain and the sun even tried to shine but then the sky would darken again and another brief shower would fall before clearing again. But we were in our comfortable, warm Ford Everest and she handled the slippery roads like the champion that she is. If safari is part of your lifestyle you have to drive a four-by-four!

Once again in spite of the weather, we had some very interesting sightings. Addo is not the park to visit if you want to see lots of cats but you can be sure elephants will be there! Today, though, they were for most of the day conspicuous by their absence and we thought this might be the only day ever on a visit to the park that we would not find them!

Zebra were everywhere and so were warthogs. There were also a number of red hartebeests and a few kudu. We could hear the birds but few made an appearance. But those who did, posed beautifully.

I shall let the photos tell the story.

A very wet mother bokmakierie violently bashed a hapless worm while her chick looked on. I think she was trying to tenderise it for him.

I took some other videos too but they’re taking forever to upload to YouTube so I will post them in another blog later.