First Game Drive

This morning we woke at 5:30am for our first game drive.

Many of these animals we saw in Tanzania two years ago but this was our first close encounter with a rhino. As I said in a previous post this is a small private preserve and the guides know where all the animals hang out. We were in Tanzania in February which is summer down here and now we are here in their winter. Once we got in the open air jeep and started flying down the dirt roads it got pretty cold. My fingers were partially numb for a while after we returned.

Steph says:
We were so close to these animals! It was extraordinary being twenty feet from a White Rhino and a similar distance from a Hippo. Our guide said that the only time Hippos are really dangerous is when
you stand in between them and the water. They kill a lot of people defending their territory.

Similarly, we were told to maintain a distance from the Cheetah who would be threatened if we got too close. It was sad to see the male by himself. His partner died recently after being bitten by a Mambo Snake.

We plan to go to the Cheetah Rescue Center while we are here. This afternoon, we are going out on another game drive but it is very windy and very cold. Thankfully, Katie Sullivan told me to bring a down jacket so I am warm.

Zulu Nyana Safari Game Lodge

Here is our room at the game lodge.

It seems a nice place though we haven't seem much of it yet.

Here is what Steph wrote to her son David early this morning:

It's 5 am and I finally gave up tossing and turning. I slept too much on the plane. We arrived here last night after waiting for our ride for over an hour. Our flight was early so apparently it wasn't noted even though Dwight had alerted them. From what I could see in the dark from the freeway, Johannesburg is sprawling with lots of American fast food and strip malls. There is apparently a horrendous traffic problem. We had to stop at the original hotel where we were booked to pay our bill before we checked in here. We were told that the first hotel - Country Manor - was closed for "security reasons" which the clerk wasn't at liberty to discuss. But she did tell us that some group had taken over the whole property and didn't want any strangers there  for fear of kidnapping! We are flying to Durban this morning and then driving three hours to Nyala. We were able to get into the other place for the 2nd three nights. I am looking forward to the excursion to St. Lucia and seeing the crocodiles. I am also excited about seeing the Cheetah at Nyala.

We have been checking the Tripadvisor reviews, something I'm sure I did last year when we won this at a silent auction, but now the reviews seem quite different. Everyone says they are here because they won it in a charity auction and someone investigated it and said most of their business comes from charities where the charity keeps half and the safari camp keeps half. Then the safari camp charges for everything other than the basics and provides rooms so poor that people feel the need to upgrade the room. We had already upgraded figuring the donated rooms wouldn't be the best. Reviews also point out that this is an extremely small private reserve with 3 elephants, one cheetah and a few other animals. People complained that they were taken to the same places each day to see the same animals. Another way the safari camp increases revenues is by offering excursions outside this preserve. A couple of reviewers recommended moving to a nearby much larger preserve called Phinda after a couple of days here. So we have arranged to move after 3 days to Phinda Rock Lodge for the rest of our safari part of this trip. The complaints about the food here (and the praise for the food at Phinda) was also a factor.

South Africa Itinerary

We are spending 6 days on safari then 5 days in Cape Town. We will be staying at the Zulu Nyala Safari Game Lodge.

The safari camp is on the northern east coast of South Africa, Cape Town is on the southwest tip.

We depart Los Angeles on Tuesday, July 28, fly through Amsterdam and arrive in Johannesburg on Wednesday night. We stay over in a hotel then flight out on Thursday for Durban where we are picked up and driven to the safari camp hotel. We are there July 31 - Aug 4 then leave on the 5th to fly to Cape Town. We are staying at the MannaBay Hotel. There we will eat, visit wine country, shop, see the sights, and relax after being on safari.

Revisions: I wrote the previous a couple of days before the start of the trip and there have been some last minute changes. On Monday morning we woke to a text and email from Delta saying our flight from LA to Amsterdam had been canceled apparently due to weather. We had KLM flights booked through Delta as a code share. We got on the phone with Delta and were booked on much better flights through Atlanta, on Delta planes. We hadn't booked that originally because it was twice the price of the KLM flights. We got to leave out of San Diego instead of LA and we arrived in Johannesburg 4 hours earlier.