Dumela, O Kae?

For those that don’t know, that’s “Hello, how are you?” in a South African dialect called Sesotho. We know this because a college student we met at the Leserdi Village told us so! (and ya, I Googled it too). She spoke English, so we couldn’t teach her that. Instead we taught her “Hola. ¿Cómo estás?” She got a kick out of that.

So, Jamie and I traveled half way across the globe to South Africa in March. Man, what a trip! It was a total of 10 days, of which 3 were spent traveling. The flight from ATL to Johannesburg was about 14.5 hours. Coming back, the flight was 16.5 hours! Then of course we had to get to Denver and drive home. It was something.

The good news is that we had a blast while we were there. We went on safari and saw an incredible amount of wildlife. Our pictures just don’t do it justice.

We came home with about 3000 pictures and even some video. I’ve recently whittled that down to 1700 before I gave up. Below, I present you with 110 of the ones we thought were good enough to post. There are many many duplicates in our collection. It was hard not pressing the shutter with lions so close!

We stayed in two places. The first place was Notten’s Bush Camp in the Sabi Sands Private Game Reserve on the border of Kruger National Park. This place is amazing. Kruger is a gigantic national park. South Africa basically fenced in 7,300 square miles of land to keep the animals in (and also to help protect people). They live in their own ecosystem. The predators feed, grazers graze, etc. A long time ago, some people bought a bunch of land that bordered a small part of the western side of the park and called it Sabi Sands. Then, they moved the fence to the other side. That means that all of the animals that are in Kruger now have access to this private land. It’s a pretty cool idea. Notten’s is a small parcel of private land. That’s where we stayed. I can’t say anything bad about it. I’ve never stayed anywhere with that level of service. Another cool thing is that the cottages we stayed in had no electricity. Everything was lit by candles and oil lamps (which made getting up at 5:30am and getting ready for the morning game drive fun). All we did was eat and sit. It was awesome! There were two game drives per day. The first was 6:00-9:00am, followed by breakfast. Lunch was served around 2pm. The second game drive was 4:00-7:00pm, followed by dinner. If you go, I hope you are lucky enough to get Thomas as a guide. He was great. He and Alpheus, the tracker, saw things that we could never see. Literally… they say “Look right there,” and we still couldn’t see anything! Luckily they were patient and could always get close enough so we actually could see it.

The second place we stayed at was The Savannah Africa, near Parys. This was the real reason we went to SA in the first place. Our friends won a charity auction for 5 nights stay here. Luckily one of the couples backed out so Jamie and I were in! We spent a lot of time sight-seeing things around Parys (and even back to JBurg). Wynand (pronounced Vie-nond) was great about showing us around while his wife, Marina, held down the fort and fed us. They were a great family and wish them the best!

As usual, here’s a breakdown:

• Life Hotel: Johannesburg - A quaint little hotel very close to the airport.
• Notten’s Bush Camp - Absolutely incredible safari experience. 5 stars, all the way. The staff, the food, the game drives, all incredible
• The Savannah Africa - A nice quiet private game reserve near Parys. Great people are currently running it
• Dell Cheetah Centre - An awesome experience with cheetah. You can actually pet some of them!
• Rhino and Lion Nature Preserve - Don’t bother. Maybe we just had a bad experience, but it just wasn’t worth it. Although, we did get to pet the lion cubs (finally)
• Feast - A nice place to eat in Parys. Go during normal business hours or the service is really bad.
• Lesedi Cultural Village - A very cool African cultural experience. We had lunch followed a bunch of different types of African dancers
• Bon-Af Berry Farm - Great berries… absolutely crazy old guy running it

On to the pictures! I’ve broken them down into 3 separate albums:

Random travel pictures

Pictures from the Notten’s Bush Camp

Pictures from the Savannah Africa & surrounding area