What a bust Hluhluwe game reserve turned out to be, admittedly the weather was lousy, rainy and dull but still you’d have thought we’d have seen more. True we got to see an elephant saunter across the road in front of us and a small herd of giraffe, with two babies, two kudu and about a dozen monkeys but that was literally it, oh wait I saw a lone zebra and as we were leaving the park a warthog and her family. That’s the problem with going to lots of game reserves you start to expect to see amazing sites around each corner, course it doesn’t help chatting to a very friendly American later on who tells you they saw a leopard and her cubs in Kruger. Dammit it’s my life long wish to see that!
Emdoneni, a lodge and cat sanctuary did however improve our otherwise disappointing day. They have cheetah, caracals, wild cats and cervils, some of which get rehabilitated back into the wild and others are used in breeding programmes. We had a large group of American touring gymnasts with us who had the rather annoying habit of making a YOLO sign every time they took a photograph, now times that by 22 and it starts to get damned annoying. We were allowed into one of the caracal enclosures whilst he was eating, pretty cool to be so close to them. We also got to have our picture taken with a cheetah (sans YOLO signs I might add) which was extremely cool although we were anticipating at least one US gymnast might become dinner, they really know no boundaries and would insist on crowding around the animals. People, these kitties may look tame but one false move and they’ll turn on you like the wild animal the are. Lastly we were allowed to play with the cervil kittens but really there were too many people trying to vie for their attention so we got the money shot and high tailed it out of there. Nice experience, the guide was funny if a little hard to understand and all in all well worth the R160 entrance fee (each).
We went relatively early to bed after eating one of Rosie’s delicious chicken curries and watching the bush babies.