Saturday 9th September
We got our usual 5:30am wake-up call from Brian, got ready and met the others to go out on our morning drive.
On the drive we saw a few new species: Crested Franklin, Brown hyena and the Southern booboo. Hyenas are hard to catch on camera as they quickly run off, but I did my best…
And a few of my other favourite photos from the drive…
After the morning drive, we went for breakfast. You don’t get much better view with your morning cuppa than that!
Some of the elephants even walked right up close to the lodges…
And I loved this photo of all the zebra drinking round the water hole in synchrony…
After breakfast and a rest we used the gym again to make room for lunch… you really do feel like you’re constantly eating here. They don’t let you go hungry!
In the afternoon we had a dip in the main pool as it was very warm.
We then got ready for our afternoon drive. On this drive we had a new American couple join (Matt and Jacqueline) as Richard and Paula had left to go to Cape Town. Here were some of my favourite pictures from the drive…
We also saw a couple of new bird species, a black winged kite and golden breasted bunting. Towards the end, as usual we stopped for our ‘sun downers’ (drinks and snacks) from ‘Charlie’s bar’ and then drove back to the lodge in the dark looking for nocturnal animals. On our way back we saw a Spotted Eagle Owl sat on the top of a branch.
When we got back to the lodge we quickly changed and got ready for the evening. We were very excited as there was going to be a Boma celebration in the evening (an evening of traditional food). When we arrived for the Boma, we took a seat around the fire and were brought over some drinks while we chatted to everyone.
Then all the staff at Madikwe entered the camp area performing traditional singing and dancing, it was amazing and we spotted Charlie performing. At one point, one of the ladies performing came into the audience and took my hand to pull me up to dance… I had no idea what I was doing but I’d had a GnT so that helped!
They then got everyone up to dance with them – it was good fun! We then took a seat at the tables in our Safari drive groups with Charlie and Brian and helped ourselves to a buffet of local foods cooked by the chefs. It was all delicious! Harry tried various meats and I tried a fish and local salads. We also tried pap, one of their common dishes, which was great! The dessert was called Malva pudding and tasted like sticky toffee pudding – it was so good! We loved experiencing a bit of the culture that evening.
Sunday 10th September
We had our usual morning wake up call from Brian and got ready for our morning game drive. We met the others and headed off – little did we know this was going to be one of our best!
Charlie and Brian found four cheetah! One was the mum and three 6-8 month old kids. They were just wandering round looking like the mum was on the hunt. So if course we followed them. You could tell the kiddies just wanted to play while mum was trying to hunt some food for them!
There are only 9 cheetah on the reserve, so to see four of them was so lucky.
Here were some more of my favourite photos from that drive…
Later on in the drive Charlie and Brian were told through their radio that there had been sighting of an adult male lion – we had been wanting to see one with a big mane! So we drove over to the location that it had been seen at which was at a river (that contains a two and a half metre croc in it!), but unfortunately just missed the lion as it had wandered over the border onto some neighbouring local private land.
However, Brian has his connections and so managed to get us across onto the land to see it. There was a male and female adult (7-8 years old) – they were beautiful sat there in the morning sun.
We also saw a few other new species on the drive – a Sibota lark, White fronted bee eater, a Cormorant, Blue balled monkeys and also a Jackel chasing a bunny. And a few more photos…
We had seen so much and were late for breakfast so Brian said we were going to head straight back now rather than stop for a coffee. Just as we started to drive back we came across 5 MORE lion! An adult male (the brother of the other one) and adult female and 3 younger ones. We were so close to them – probably 5 metres from the closest. I must say it was a little nerve wracking when they looked straight at you! But they didn’t seem phased.
We then headed back to the lodge for breakfast – what a morning we had had, we were so lucky and very happy!
We had a quick breakfast as it wasn’t long before we were meeting Brian again for a bush walk that we had arranged with him. This involved going on roughly a one hour walk around the reserve close to the lodge. Brian loaded his gun and we headed out. Before we left he told us ‘If you see an animal, when we were in the truck, the rule was no standing up, now the rule is no running!) We felt very safe with Brian though – he knows his stuff for sure!
We didn’t see any animals (unfortunately or thankfully?!), but Brian taught us a lot about identifying animal tracks (we even saw some black rhino tracks – we had only seen white rhino so far on the drives). He also taught us about some of the plants and other smaller wildlife on the ground, such as insects, like the trap door spider whose ‘homes’ we saw).
It was really interesting… but so hot (36 degrees)! We made it back in one piece!
When we got back we had some lunch and after lunch had another swim in the main pool to cool down.
On the afternoon drive, we started by driving to the back of the lodges where the water hole is that we can see from the dining area and our lodge (we hadn’t been out the back before, as they can only do it if no guests stay behind at the lodges as you don’t want to accidentally see someone showering in their outside shower on their decking!). It was nice to see the lodges from the animals view point…
After that, Brian told us we were going on a search for wild dogs, as we hadn’t seen any of those so far. So we went to a completely different part of the reserve where wild dogs are often spotted. Unfortunately we had no luck with seeing any wild dogs but we did a new bird species – the purple rola. Here are some other photos from the drive…
We also had a lovely ‘sun downers’ stop and had some photos too.
When we got back from the drive, the staff had run a lovely bubble bath on our room with candles. It was lovely as it had been quite dusty on the afternoon drive.
That evening, we had a delicious (as always) last dinner.
Monday 11th September
Our checkout time wasn’t until 11:30am, so we still got to go on the morning game drive. So we got ready and met for the drive. It was chilly this morning!
Straight away we saw the Cheetah again that we had seen yesterday – it looked like they were still hadn’t eaten and were trying to hunt. We observed them for a bit and then moved on for others to see them.
We also saw a lovely giraffe very close up…
We didn’t see much else, so this left time for a bush coffee stop. Harry and I both had a bush mix as some nice breakfast snacks. Charlie taught me how to make his bush mix so I could make it at home!
On our way back to the lodge we saw a male Ostrich in the distance (black in colour) and a female Ostrich up close (brown in colour). They’re so big!
When we got back we had a lovely breakfast and then went and packed our bags. We were so sad to be leaving! We wrote letters for Brian, Charlie and the staff at Madikwe to say thank you and said our good-byes to everyone – even the elephants came to the water hole to say goodbye!
Our transfer driver back to Johannesburg was quite a quiet and emotional 5 hour journey… What a special place Madikwe is and an incredible time we had there. We will miss it and the people very much.
Towlers' Travels 
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