Tag: wildlife

Another special moment – Leopards in Sri Lanka

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Let me say at the outset that Africa is in my blood. It’s our ‘go to’ holiday to experience the adrenalin rush of sighting something both rare and spectacular! In my book, there’s nothing to beat seeing a pack of Wild Dogs out on a hunt or a Cheetah trying to finish its meal before another predator comes in for the steal.

Then there’s the Leopard. One of nature’s masterpieces, not least because of its ability to blend in with its surroundings. It has the perfect camouflage.

So why am I talking about Leopards under a Sri Lanka heading?

After our stunning adventures in Africa in 2023, we decided to experience something different at the start of 2024. Sri Lanka was our choice, and it didn’t disappoint!  A little research before heading out on safari on this lovely island told us that both Yala and Wilpattu National Parks were ‘good for Leopards’. There are no Lions in Sri Lanka, and unlike in India there are no tigers either, so the Leopard is therefore very much the king of the jungle here.

If the theory of wildlife experts is to be believed, these two national parks have the highest density of leopards in the world. That may be so, but Leopards can be well hidden, and as we set out on our safaris we realised the dense vegetation, the jungle, of Sri Lanka’s parks was not going to make it any easier than in Southern Africa. We know from experience that sometimes you can safari for days on end and not have the privilege of even the briefest of glimpses of a Leopard.

What was the chance of seeing one on a full day in Wilpattu? This park is quieter than Yala and, therefore, I felt it would give us a better chance. Our driver new our mission and, with our travel guide Suminda, we embarked on our full day’s drive. There were hardly any other safari vehicles around so little or no ‘intelligence’ to aid our quest.

It was to be around the middle of the day when we ‘got a sniff’. A tip off from another driver led us to one of the best-known locations for Leopards. We were rewarded with a clear sighting of one of these most beautiful animals and, what’s more, we were able to watch it at close quarters on and off for almost an hour…………It strutted about both in a clearing and in the jungle….at to one point it made a half hearted attempt to chase a wild boar…………And that familiar African ‘adrenalin rush’ came flooding back!! We felt very privileged. 

Day 11 & 12- Nata Lodge and The Sua (Sowa) Pans

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Day 11

We prepared to leave Maun…..we paid the food, drink and laundry bill at The Safari Lodge Maun…the accommodation had been pre-paid…we were a little aghast at the laundry bill and made a mental note not to do it here again if we ever re-visited. The hotel had been great…we had, had a deluxe double which had a little patio overlooking the almost dried up river bed which was great for people watching and watching cars being washed in the tiny pockets of water which remained…the Botswana people are never short of enterprising ideas to solve environmental problems…

From Maun we drove back towards Kasane, we were stopping for two nights at Nata lodge, which sits on the Sua (Sowa) Pans . We had often thought of doing this, when we used to drive through to Chobe from Mafeking or Johannesburg in South Africa. It had quite a reputation as being a nice place,  but we were always in a rush to get to our beloved Chobe. 

Nata Lodge is in the same group of hotels as Chobe Safari Lodge, the group is known as “Under one Botswana Sky” …the three hotels which we are familiar with in this group all charge much the same for accommodation and activities. 

The drive from Maun to Nata was uneventful, a few herds of elephant drinking out of water pipe access holes, a few herds of zebra on the road side, a stray Jackie strutting his stuff down the middle of the road….just the sort of thing you expect to see on one of the countries main tarred roads!!! 

On arriving at Nata Lodge we booked in and went to our room. It was a wooden structure on stilts. Although quite dark inside it was similar in layout to the Chobe Safari lodge rooms- large bed, desk, arm chair, open bathroom area with sink and freestanding bath, separate toilet and separate shower. The only difference was that the shower was outside…which is great when the weather is fine but not so great when it rained cold, dirty/sandy rain. I guess it exfoliates your skin all over your body fairly cheaply and gives your hair a golden sand tint!!!!!! 

We rested during the afternoon, rather frustrated that we couldn’t get WiFi in our accommodation neither the hotel,or our own router gave us a signal.  We finally went to the bar area where we managed to get an intermittent signal. We had our evening meal in the open restaurant.

It was fairly full of a large tour groups, who seemed to be given preference over us lone travellers…….This continued over the two evenings and mornings we were there…we defiantly felt like second class citizens.. a never again experience, after all we paid more for our meals than tour groups did and we should have been given good attentive service.

Day 12 

Today we relaxed, spending our time reorganising the packing, photos, writing blogs and finally going to the bar to upload using the weak internet…John walked the grounds photographing birds and we both became fascinated by a woodpecker in a nearby tree. 

At 3.00 pm we climbed aboard a Safari vehicle, with 4 other couples. There were 2 other vehicles full of a big group of German tourists. We were going on to the Sua ( Sowa) pans where there is a resident large flock of Flamingos, along with some pelicans, and the usual wildebeest and zebras who live and transverse the pans.

We were allowed to alight from the vehicles and walk to the edge of the lake. Although the massive flamboyance of flamingos was a distance away it was a truly fabulous sight, a hue of pink. Some were flying in and out, pelicans were closer by observing us. 

It was idyllic, or at least it would have been if it hadn’t been for the two other vehicles of very noisy tourists who set up a cocktail bar between the Safari vehicles and loudly proceeded to have copious amounts to drink.

They continued to party for well over an hour, even dancing…we asked our driver if we could please go but he said not until all our group was on the vehicle…so 3 other couples and us waited for one couple to finish their party…we returned to the lodge, passing more wildebeest as the sun went down …..

We were quite disgruntled, as this noisy, boozy crowd was well below the standard of Safari we expect…we were so disappointed. 

Our disappointment continued at supper, when we were given a table in a very dark area, the service was so slow we had to keep asking..’can we place our order please’, ‘Excuse me please but where’s our food’, ‘could we see the dessert menu please’, ‘Excuse me, is our dessert coming before breakfast!’ ……there was another couple of independent travellers who also seemed to be invisible…….We returned to our room wondering why we had booked in here…this was defiantly a never again experience…

Botswana – Day 9 & 10 – Rest, reflect and Moremi Game Reserve.

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Day 9 

We spent day 9 in the Safari Lodge hotel in Maun. The previous day had been wonderful, but it was a long tiring day. To get maximum enjoyment out of our adventure we knew we needed to put in some “nothing “ relaxation days …this was one of these. We slept in late, prepared the bag to send to 5he laundry and reflected on our previous day….. The Okavango is an extremely expensive adventure, camping makes it slightly cheaper but even that’s probably one of the most expensive camping experiences anyone can have. Mobile camping with a company also reduces the cost slightly but John and I are no campers. It was the same as in the Pans area, unless you are an extremely competent 4×4 driver and know how to get through soft sand tracks which can leave all 4 tyres spinning helplessly, you need to go with a Safari company or hire both a vehicle and a driver……( for those who think they are good enough to self drive don’t forget to let your tyres down ….hard tyres really churn the sand up so always drive this type of road with soft tyres. One of the reasons it’s so expensive here is that with both the two safaris we did in the pans and the two from Maun you have to either be a party of 4 or pay for 4 people…..it seemed the majority of companies were charging US$250 per person and all insisted on a minimum of 4 people…..this is what makes it so expensive when it’s just the 2 of us…most people on normal budgets just find the cost prohibiting……..we had decided that this was a very special occasion so it was worth “splashing the cash”.

We updated our Facebook pages, what’s append home and prepared for the following day. We had agreed with Monametsi that we would have a full day in Moremi Game reserve. He had kindly dropped the price to US$800 for the day.

Day 10

We were stood outside the hotel at 5.00am, ( an hour which doesn’t appear on my clock at home, unless we are jet-lagged !!!), waiting for Monametsi to arrive and for one of his Safari vehicles ……time was passing at 5.50am we were about to give up our wait…besides it’s cold even with fleeces, scarfs and gloves at that time of the morning…..just as we were about to go back to bed! …the Safari vehicle arrived…. It turned out the battery had been stolen during the night so the driver had put his car battery on it but that wouldn’t allow us to stop and start with confidence. So we were to set off and wait at the end of the tar for Monametsi to catch us up with a new battery, our breakfast and lunch…. Which is exactly what happened although the blankets were forgotten and we were very cold…

With new battery fitted off we went again…before we got to the Reserves gate we saw a variety of wildlife both dead and alive……this included the sad sight of an elephant who had got stuck in the mud of a waterhole and died, another elephant was showing its last respects. 

Once inside Moremi Reserve we stopped at the gate again and had breakfast, used the ablution block and watched some squirrels playing and hornbills scrounging bits of dropped food.
Then we were off on our day of sightseeing and wildlife spotting. We saw copious amounts of Lechwe, Tsessebe, ( both of these we rarely see so we were delighted to see such big herds)

We also spotted elephants, zebra, giraffe, warthog, hippos, and lots of birds however our search for lions was in vein.

The reserve was quiet and, other than at the main gate, we saw very few other vehicles all day. Some of the tracks we traversed looked hardly used and were extremely overgrown. This added to the experience as we parted the grasses, it was almost off-roading, and the air of suspense hung around as as we scoured the landscape for exciting wildlife spots.

We pulled up under a tree out of, the now, hot sun for lunch……Days like this need either a strong bladder or nerves of steel if you risk nipping behind the bush !!! We once again passed through the South Gate as we made our exit before the 6.00pm deadline.

It was a lovely day, we returned about 8 pm and had a nice supper in the hotel…..if we were honest the day probably wasn’t worth the money but it was an area we had never explored before and we thoroughly enjoyed seeing different types of landscape and terrain as well as the wonderful wildlife.
We once again ate in the restaurant. We chatted happily to a newly retired Doctor and his wife both of whom were from England. They were on a very interesting ‘Intrepid Traveller’ Overland tour from Cape Town to Victoria Falls. The itinerary was truly adventurous and we might have been interested in something like this in the future if it hadn’t been for the couple saying how exhausting it was….this is often a problem on guided organised tours, they rarely put the much needed rest days in, which I prefer to call laundry and catch-up days…or just sleep-in days…..it’s really worth remembering this, I’d learnt my lesson on a trip to India where we’d gone a straight 7 days of sightseeing and moving on , we’d comeback needing a holiday !!!!!

Botswana -Day 7 & Day 8 -Maun & The Okavango

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Day 7 We said goodbye to Gweta Lodge and continued our trip by driving on to Maun. We spent a short time in town buying a data SIM card to put in our mobile router so we could have WiFi….we were advised to get an orange sim card…ummm!…what a waste ……it worked in Maun but nowhere else. I had booked us into Maun Lodge for 4 nights. It was expensive at around £96per night B&B  but then Maun is the 5th largest town in Botswana and the ‘Gateway to The Okavango Delta’. I hadn’t booked any activities in advance as it was our first time in Maun. When we got there I googled Safari companies because the hotel’s activities desk was very expensive. We hired a company called Moonstroll. They were very professional and Monametsi who owned the company met us in our hotel that evening and talked through our requirements. 

Day 8 We liked the fact that Monametsi turned up at 5.30am and took payment once we were on the Safari vehicle. They only took cash US$ or he would have taken Rands and he appreciated we weren’t going to pay in advance as we didn’t know whether this unknown person would pitch up or just take our money …… it was his idea to do it this way to give us confidence….they provided us with rugs, breakfast and lunch and a snack plus soft drinks and loads of water…We were off to Moremi Game Reserve and on the far side a place called 3rd Bridge which is the only place to get a boat from, at this time of the year, to go out on the Okavango Delta……..it cost US$1000 for the day………was I excited or not!!!! My dream was about to come true…I’d always wanted to do this from the age of 24 when I first visited Africa….but it is so expensive I had never been able to justify spending this sort of money on one of my ‘Must do before I die’ wishes.

Wrapped up warmly we headed off towards Moremi Game reserve. The start  of the road is tar, which we speed along for about 40 minutes and then a further 30 minutes on a gravel road and then an hour and a half on very soft sand road. We saw a variety of wildlife and birds as we got closer to the Southern gate of Moremi.

On arriving at the south gate we used the washrooms and sat and ate our breakfast before embarking on a three hour game viewing drive through the reserve before getting to the boat station at Third Bridge. 

Here we met Captain Moses and boarded his flat bottom, pontoon like boat, along with our Safari guide Kennedy. 

Once all our picnic hampers, drinks, cool boxes, camera bags etc were aboard we set off through the narrow canals of the Okavango Delta. Our first spot was a malachite kingfisher which set the standard for seeing many other fantastic sights such as African Jacana, hippos, wattled cranes, fish Eagan’s, elephants, red letchwe…….to name but a few.

The waterways were littered with floating islands of pampas grasses, papyrus grasses( which they use for basket weaving), massive beds of water lilies and loads more vegetation. 

We watched with fascination as Fish Eagles swooped in and out of the water…..sometimes successful and sometimes not…. their huge wing span moving the air above our heads as they soundlessly went about their usual activities.

Our 3 hour trip went far too quickly. It was nothing short of magnificent, awesome, breath-taking, eye-opening…….it really was the stuff dreams are made of. 

We made our return journey to the gate at high speed arriving a few minutes before closing time at 6.00pm. The rest of the shake, rattle and roll homeward bound trip was in the dark and we finally got back to the hotel around 8.45pm. 

A wonderful long tiring day. Thank you Moonstroll Safaris for turning dreams into reality …….Thank you John for saying it’s ‘A once in a lifetime experience’ so we won’t worry about the cost. I loved every minute of it.

Our Special Celebratory Trip to Botswana 2023 Day 2 to Day 4

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Our trip to Botswana in May 2023 was to celebrate Johns 70th birthday and my 60th which had been two years prior to this during the pandemic lockdown. 

Day2 – We flew into Kasane and hired a non 4×4 but high clearance vehicle( for pot hole avoidance). Although I am a reasonably experienced 4×4 driver, I don’t like driving the sand roads in Botswana……they are deep and very soft in the dry season and like driving on a skid pad which sucks you in, in the wet season…. we rented in advance from Avis a Toyota Urban Cruiser…it was a good price and the customer assistant, Ben was a delightfully helpful young man. 

We had booked into Chobe Safari lodge on line with booking.com We had bed, breakfast and evening meal  with a river view in a Safari Room for £175  or Botswana Pula 2300 per night for two people  ….it’s quite luxurious and there are lots of places cheaper in Chobe their sister hotel Chobe Bush Lodge on the same site is considerably cheaper but no river view….booking.com was cheaper than booking direct it was also the cheapest we’ve paid at that lodge for around 9/10 years…so it’s worth investigating.

You wouldn’t drive yourself in Chobe unless you were an extremely experienced 4×4 driver ( a few years ago I thought I was but had to be dug out, an embarrassing moment) Game drives through the activities desk at the hotel are US$45 / P 360 per person and River cruise is US $42/P350 per person, We  just managed to get from the car hire to the lodge in time for the afternoon Safari drive. It was a full jeep load and a driver who wanted to show us everything…hence a fairly fast bumpy drive but lots of excitment as we saw our first wildlife of our trip. 

Day 3 The next day we drove to Gweta. There are only a few tar roads in Northern Botswana so it’s quite straight forward to find one’s way. From Kasane take the road to Francis Town and turn right at Nata to Maun. It’s extremely straight forward  the road towards Francis Town is in good condition…but then I can remember back to when it was a dirt road before becoming a one strip tarred road and now by Botswana Standards it’s practically a motorway…two lane tar all the way !!! After a 5 hour drive on mostly good tar roads, interspersed with a few areas where it was better to drive in the bush at the side of the road than risk falling into a pothole…I think we emerged with all, 4 tyres intact but we’d know when we woke up the next day….at least you get a spare tyre in Botswana….. we arrived at Gweta Lodge for a 4 night stay…….Gweta lodge can only be described as quirky…it’s neither palatial or primitive…..it had electricity and even weak WiFi in the bar area….the en-suite room has mosquito nets over the beds (which is just as well as the door and it’s frame are miles apart) and air conditioning. They were in the process of building luxury rooms…none of which were available when we booked. Somewhere like Gweta lodge in the Salt pan area is about £65  or P1030 per night for the room for 2  ….The lodge had so much going for it but it just lacked management and the workers lacked direction, which meant the rooms and facilities were not shown in the best light. The cleaners did an adhoc job with no structure or routine and no checklist …so some areas of the room looked as if they had never been cleaned, and you may or may not get towels, soap, loo roll etc without having to go to reception and ask…. That evening we had a braii/ barbecue and met a nice Dutch couple, Cynthia and Jooste.  Cynthia Goedhart owns the Facebook page – “Travelling Namibia & Botswana: ideas ~ advice ~ experiences ~ inspiration! “…….with over 42.9K members it is one of the most popular Facebook African travel sites and well worth taking a look if you are travelling in this area. 

Day 4  We got up early as we were off to Ntwetwe Pans, part of the Makgadikgadi  Pans, ( about the size of Switzerland) for a full day of discovery. We had booked a safari from the lodge into Ntwetwe pans to see the furthest north meerkats. It was great not having to worry about the driving and having the whole Safari vehicle to ourselves. 

We were collected by ‘Chief’ in the Safari jeep. He was a charismatic young man, who originally didn’t take onboard the fact that we had years and years of experience of African Safari  and being in the African bush……he soon learnt the error of his ways when our spotting eyes and knowledge challenged his own less considerable skill, and he realised he was going to have to work for his money, ( US$1000 for the day meant we weren’t going to let him off lightly !!!!), rather than just joy ride!!!! We drove for about 1.15 hrs along what looked like animal tracks through marrula  scrub land….our wildlife viewing consisted of donkeys, horses, cows, we saw absolutely no other vehicle or persons even though we passed several cattle corrals with nothing but some barking dogs guarding them. Finally we got to an area of flat plains behind which was the gleaming white of the salt pans. We turned to drive along the plains and The Chief told us to look out for a man and tell him if we saw one.……we didn’t but he did and soon we were greeted by Como….who was sat on a slightly raised area of the plains. We then sat for a while until a family of meerkats began to pop up…really cute. Evidently there were 14 in the colony although we only saw 6 …delightful, busy, inquisitive little creatures. We had breakfast, if that’s what you call it, while watching the meerkats. Thankfully their antics distracted us from the curled up cheese sandwich, hard boiled egg and bread roll and the metallic tasting coffee. 

After an hour we headed on to the pan where we surprised a pair of jackals.

Our 2 minute drive on the pan was over in a flash and we were soon back on the animal tracks  heading for the famous Chapmans baobab tree. An hour later we pulled up at an area strewn with fibrous tree remains and a heritage national monument sign…the famous huge Chapmans Baobab had collapsed in  2016…yes we had taken an excursion to view a once was but no longer is magnificent tree !!!!!!!! John was polite and descended the vehicle and took a picture of the sign telling us about the tree which isn’t there any more. I am afraid the effort of climbing off and on the vehicle didn’t warrant the ‘nothing left of the tree’ view so I stayed put. 

Sensing our disappointment The Chief told us we were carrying on to see another baobab…I couldn’t contain my delight!!

On the way to our next tree viewing we visited the only 2 pans which still have a small amount of water in. To our surprise both had huge herds of wildebeest which had yet to follow the zebra migration. There was also a large number of vultures spread winged cooling off….it was a magnificent sight and what with the earlier sightings of meerkats it made our day a happy one. 
On the way to our next tree viewing we visited the only 2 pans which still have a small amount of water in. To our surprise both had huge herds of wildebeest which had yet to follow the zebra migration. There was also a large number of vultures spread winged cooling off….it was a magnificent sight and what with the earlier sightings of meerkats it made our day a happy one. 

We continued on to the the next baobab, which was actually still standing.

After a bite of lunch which fared more favourably than the breakfast we were once again subjected to the bone shaking high speed journey back to the lodge. The speed of the return was such that we had no choice but to hang on for dear life and pray. 

A lovely experience with the highlights being the meerkats and the wildebeest.

We enjoyed our evening meal chatting once again to Cynthia and Jooste.