3rd June 2012 – Stay at Mopani Camp

3rd June 2012 – Stay at Mopani Camp

Wayne woke up at 4am and decided to do some star trail photography from out patio. Unfortunately the moon was in our view which is not normally great news for star trails but it actually made for an interesting photo in this case.

Standard procedure meant we left camp at 6am and headed up to Mopani Camp. We weren’t very optimistic after not seeing anything yesterday morning and but on nearing Letaba we saw a couple of hyenas so we were very pleased! We think this was near their den but we couldn’t see any others so we’re not sure.

Further along the drive we also saw an elephant bull in the road coming towards us. He looked a little grumpy and we were concerned that it might charge us but thankfully he went off into the bushes.

Just ahead of here we saw a large herd of elephants with quite a few babies. It was amazing to watch as one baby went to drink from his mother three other elephants circled around it so it was completely protected from all sides whilst it drank – amazing to see them all working together and the closeness of the family. We were also surprised at how large the female elephants were, there were so many but unfortunately none of them were big tuskers.

Nearing Mopani we saw a tsessebe, this was our first sighting in KNP of these before going to sit in a hide for a bit but we didn’t see much, a few birds, some hippos and a crocodile.

It was still too early to check into Mopani so we decided to keep driving up to Shingwedzi camp. It was a very quiet drive seeing very little, if any animals at all. We stopped at the camp for a loo break and ice cream before heading back to Mopani Camp.

On the way back we did see a large herd of buffalo and an elephant with reasonably large tusks (well 1 tusk was) but not much else.

We arrived at Mopani at 1pm so went and had lunch before checking in.

We then headed out for an afternoon game drive not feeling at all confident at seeing anything after such a quiet morning. We visited Mooiplaas Waterhole where there were lots of zebras and wildebeest as well as a small herd of elephants. We watched them for a while before continuing on and going on a small 20km loop before returning to the waterhole. 4 elephant bulls came to drink and we saw 4 wildebeest fighting with each other. We then witnessed 2 male zebras fighting for what we can only assume to be the main stallion of the herd. The sounds that they were making were unbelievable. The one that we believe was the current main stallion was whining and was clearly getting very exhausted as the other zebra chased him around all over the place for well over an hour. It appeared that he was trying to bite off his genitals as there was a lot of blood around that area of the zebra as well as in the other zebra’s mouth. It was brutal. Eventually they both ran into the nearby bushes but only one came out. It was a fight to the death and now they had a new dominant stallion in the group. It was incredible to see but it tugged on my heart to see one zebra injure the other so badly. We don’t know if the other zebra survived but we will return to the waterhole in the morning to find out as we only had 10 minutes to get back to camp before they closed the gate.

Back at camp Wayne started up our braai and I screamed as I walked into our room as there was something big and black crawling along the floor (about 20cm circumference) and so my natural reaction was that it was a big spider. I ran out and Wayne came to see what had startled me. He went to have a look and advised me that it was a bat. Why where they in our room? Upon closer inspection there were a lot of bats in our room (at least 15). Wayne tried to remove most of them but they started flying around trying to get out and so we couldn’t get them all. We went to reception and they put us in another room. As we had already started our braai here, we ate supper (as this meant we were outside) before going to our new room.