5th June 2012 – Stay at Letaba Camp

5th June 2012 – Stay at Letaba Camp

As usual we left camp at 6am and decided to spend the day further south towards Satara. By 6.10am we saw 2 hyenas on the road intently sniffing something. This got us excited that we would see some good game today! This was also our first predator sighting this far up north!

As we drove down a man stopped us to say that he’d just seen 2 cubs cross the road and thought that the females must be around somewhere. We had a look but we couldn’t see any so we continued on our drive down KNP. Despite seeing the most amount of game yet this far north we still had not seen any impalas for Wayne! On the way down we did eventually see some, well quite a lot actually, as well as some buffalo, kudu, giraffe, elephant, waterbuck etc. We also managed to get a photo of the saddle billed stalk which was good.

Once arriving at Satara we drove along the S100 and saw a pride of lions; 5 females, 3 cubs and the male pride lion. This was our first sighting of all pride members together and it was a great sighting as they were less than 10m from our car and were lying on some rocks out in the sun with no grass blocking our view of them. We sat and watched them sleep and interact. They all looked very skinny and in need of a good meal.

One of the cubs was clearly the runt as was trying all the females to see if they would let him suckle but they weren’t having any of it. Once the other 2 cubs had finished eating he was eventually allowed to suckle but I don’t think there was much left.

After about 20 minutes they all became alert as a herd of elephants came down to the water to drink. They started stalking towards them (I don’t think at this point the lions realised what was making the noise) but we lost them in the bushes. It was interesting to watch as the pride moved towards the elephants, the females first, then the male before the cubs followed far behind.

We did manage to watch the elephants drink and it was clear that they could smell the lions. After we lost sight of them we headed back towards Satara for lunch and on the way we saw some ostriches but nothing much else until we were 50m from Satara camp and there was a large bull elephant just standing in the middle of the road. He seemed quite happy but didn’t have any intention of moving. After a few minutes and about 10+ cars waiting to pass him from either side he eventually moved over to the side of the road for us to cross.

After grabbing some lunch we headed to the dam. Here were also some lionesses but it wasn’t a very good sighting, especially compared to the one we had in the morning so after 10 minutes we decided to head back to camp as it would take us over 2 hours to get there. On the road up to Letaba from Satara we saw a few bull elephants, a rhino and 3 juvenile male lions! Lots of lion sightings today!


We arrived at camp with 15 minutes to spare before the gate closed. We had a quick wander around the camp as there were some very tame bushbuck – Wayne walked all the way up to them and probably could have touched them, as well as some vervet monkeys and lots of bats!