May 29th, 2025

Up one last time for game drive number 7. It is just the 2 of us this am in our jeep and both Trevor and Chane are done for 2 weeks as soon as the game drive is finished. According to Chane having us for this many days is actually less stressful because they want you to see everything and now that we have today is just drive around and see what we see. No pressure to have to find a lion or leopard. When we headed out Trevor was tracking lots of lion prints.

And example of the tracks Trevor was seeing. We thought we would get a bonus sighting but as everyone starting getting out on game drives reports of lion prints came in from all over. The best they can determine is that the lions were very active and covered a lot of territory last night and maybe even crossed over into another preserve. So no more lion sightings for us.

We did some some more birds though and another type of eagle.

The eagle is a juvenile Tawny eagle and when it gets older its head will be all brown and more born on its chest. The one on the right is another picture of the lilac breasted roller and while you can;t see the head due to the branch you can see how lilac the breast is. I was trying to catch one in flight because depending on how the sun hits it the color is incredible and while we saw several in flight I could never catch a photo of it.

Crested Barbet on the left which feed off termites and a Dendropicos (woodpecker family) on the right.

We did not see a ton of animals on the last drive. Not sure if is the location we went in or the fact that they are doing controlled burns in the region but while we saw a few animals definitely not a lot.

Wildebeest on the left and a male and female Kudo on the right.

More rhinos including this cute little guy who gave out the teeniest little squeak you have ever heard coming from something so big and then plopped down on his side to take a nap. As you can imagine rhinos getting down and up are not graceful.

We did look up white rhinos because we remember when we were in Kenya 25 plus years ago, rhinos were very rare and we actually had to go to a rehabilitation center to see 1 White rhino who refused to leave even though rehab was complete. From what we read and saw there is a big difference between a Northern white rhino and a Southern white rhino and the Southern White Rhino is flourishing while the Northern is considered almost extinct with only 2 females left.

We had a long morning coffee break by a river that stills has a little water in it and they serve the best shortbread cookies with morning coffee. Of course they also bring a bottom of the liquor Amarula to put in your coffee or hot chocolate of so inclined. Since it was just the 4 of us and they send containers of the homemade shortbread cookies I brought a plastic bag and emptied both containers into it as a souvenir.

When you get back from your game drives there is always someone there to meet you. Either the manager of the assistant manager to ask you how everything went and to see if you needed anything. We got our picture taken with Trevor and Chane.

As soon as the jeep is cleaned up Trevor will drive home to see his 2 daughter. Chane is going to Johannesburg to stay with her uncle and will wait until the morning to drive the 6 hours.

We had one last breakfast and I had my customary omelette and I took a few more pictures of the outside areas of the lodge.

The Cape Buffalo and a Rhinoceros at the watering hole this am.

The outside viewing/sitting area with the breakfast and lunch dining area behind in the picture on the left. They have a very nice air-conditioned room where they have all the food for those 2 meals. During our entire stay we never saw flies on any of the food even during dinner time when we ate outside.

The pool area which also looks out over the watering hole. There are actually 2 pools and it was too cool to get in either.

We had enough time to go back to the room and shower and pack for an 11 am checkout. Our ride to the airport was at 11:30 for a 1:30 flight. Chane came by to wish us safe travels and then we were loaded into one of the safari jeeps and off to the very small airport (not the Sabi Sabi private airport) which is on the border of Kruger. Not sure why we did not fly into this airport since it is only 40 minutes away instead of the 2:40 from when we came in but we did not make the arrangements. We basically took the same dirt roads that we have been using for game drives to get to the airport.

The airport is a round open air building in the middle of nowhere and check-in took 2 minutes. Flight was on time to Johannesburg and when we got there we had almost 7 hours to wait before our flight to Atlanta. Check in started at 5 and ofter check-in we went to one of the many Priority Pass lounges and stayed there until 8:30 when we went to our gate.

We are now in Atlanta after 16 hours which we did sleep for a lot of it since we were up so early. Our flight home is at 10:30 so we should be home by noon.

It was a great trip and we both agree that everything happens for a reason and in some way we are glad that we had the time at home to relax before doing the African safari. If it had been at the end of a 75 day cruise we would have been tired and ready to get back home. While we are not at all happy at how Oceania handled it we do agree we enjoyed our time in Africa more than we thought we would.

Next adventure is visit our good friends Merv & Michelle in Australia to see some of Western Australia at the end of August and then off to Bali with them. Not sure if we will blog or not and if we do probably not every day.

Thank you all again for the comments and following along and if planning a safari look into the Sabi Sabi properties although be prepared for sticker shock! If we do hear anything from Oceania in response to our letter we will post it on the blog but not really expecting to hear anything back from them.

PS we are going to our gate now so Kathy did not have time to check this for spelling and grammatical errors so I apologize.