December 7 - December 10, 2024: Singita Sweni Lodge, Kruger National Park, South Africa
After a quick breakfast at the hotel, our greeter met us up in the lobby and shuttled us to the small private airport behind O.R. Tambo, where Singita had a private room for us to wait for our puddle-jumper.
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| Our plane to Kruger Our guide, Chantelle met us as we stepped off the plane, she helped us with our luggage and loaded us into her air-conditioned van for a 30min drive to the lodge. Once at the lodge we checked into our rooms, unpacked and then headed out for our first game drive where we met Glass, our tracker.  The weather at Kruger was really hot- around 100 degrees F in the afternoons, so game drives were either at 5:30am in the morning or 4pm in the afternoon when it was a little cooler. Drive 1: 4pm Dec 7 We were fortunate the weather was a a lot cooler than typical for our first drive and we saw lots of impalas, elephants and giraffes. In Kruger, the guides are connect via radio and one Chantelle's colleague had an exciting spot, so we went to see what it was - a mama white rhino and her baby. We followed the rhinos a bit and then went on our way. We also spent a lot of time watching the birds at the "fish trap", where we saw a rare saddle-billed stork.
  
Drive 2: 5:30am Dec 8 Our morning drive on Day 2 included hyenas and leopards in addition to the impalas, elephants and giraffes.
We were hunting for a mama leopard and her two cubs. We found one cub hiding in the bush when we got a radio call that someone found the mama. Chantelle did a great job following mama giving us plenty of viewing time. We then went back to where the first cub was - and while we couldn't find him we found his sister sleeping on a rock. Drive 3: 4:00pm Dec 8 Tonight we were on the hunt for a pride of lions or some buffalo- their tracks were together. After following the tracks for a bit, Chantelle and Glass parked the jeep, told us not to move and walked into the bush, gun in hand. We were pretty shocked when they got back to the car and said they had found the lions. There were 18 in total, 5 adult females and 13 cubs.    After watching the lions we went for sundowners and were treated to a beautiful sunset.  Drive 4: 5:30am Dec 9 Meredith opted to take the morning off so Micki and Filip were on their own. It was a good drive to skip as there was a lot of hunting for cats but we didn't find any. We did see a lot of babies- including one very little, very cute warthog and just before heading in we found a heard of buffalo in the distance. Drive 5: 4:00pm Dec 9 After driving for a few minutes we spotted some elephant and Filip said he wanted to sit and watch them eat- so we did, but we could also hear an animal in distress not too far away. As we were leaving the elephants we were very surprised to come across a leopard carrying the animal in distress - a young impala lamb. We watched the leopard eating his dinner for a while and then moved on only to find the lion pride we had been hunting for all morning. After the lions, we stopped for sundowners and Filip flew his kite.  Drive 6: 5:30am Dec 10: our last drive at Sweni For our last drive at Sweni we found a great spot where we saw the pride of lions, a male lion (the first one we have seen) nearby under a bush, a white rhino, some warthogs and some impala. After watching them for a while we started to head back to the lodge and found the leopard sleeping on the bank beside the bridge. It was the same leopard from last night and around the same spot he caught the impala yesterday.
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