flanerie.org

I have finally got around to sorting out my safari photos, and they can be found over here at flickr.

The Gomo Gomo Lodge is in the private Timbavati reserve which borders the Kruger National Park. There is no fence between the two so they share the same population of animals.

We were there two nights and one day and the daily routine was:
- Up at 5.30
- Game drive 6.15 (3 hrs)
- Breakfast 9.30
- Bush walk 11.00
- Lunch 13.00
- Game drive 15.30 (3hrs)
- Dinner 19.30

Which was pretty exhausting and didn't leave much time for anything else. You wouldn't want to spend you entire holiday there - three days and nights would be plenty, and our stay there was a little too short.

The game drives are what it was all about - up to nine people in a Land Rover on raised seating with a Ranger (Arend) and a tracker (Oscar). The drives either started in dark and ended in daylight or vice versa and the ranger did his best to find the animals we requested and threw in a few surprises.

What I wasn't expecting was how the animals totally ignored the vehicles. My photos are with a regular 3x zoom digital camera and are mostly uncropped, so you get the idea how close we got.

The highlights were the lions, more on which in another post, and the elephants.

I was desperate to see a leopard and we spend almost all of our last 3 hour drive tracking one, never to actually see it. At least they said they were tracking one - all those footprints look the same to me.

As a first safari experience Gomo Gomo was ideal, and now I am hooked and can't wait to return to Kruger.