8th June 2012 – Stay at Wild Forest Inn

8th June 2012 – Stay at Wild Forest Inn

I thought it would be hard to get up after a late night but both Wayne and I woke up early in anticipation of what we would see on our last day. We both acknowledged that we had seen so much already and so didn’t think we’d see much in our last few hours before leaving. How wrong were we?! We left camp early at 5.50am as the gates were open, and a couple minutes into driving we saw a hyena by the road.

Further along we suddenly remembered that we hadn’t handed our keys in before leaving camp so we had to turn around and go back. Just before entering camp we saw a bus hit an impala. It was very sad and we were glad this wasn’t the last thing we saw before leaving the park. After dropping our room key off at camp we headed back onto the road. We could not see the bus or the impala; we think they may have taken it with them for supper!

Further along the road there were lots of cars pulled up as there were lions. Wayne saw one of them running away from the road and as we had seen lots of lions and the sighting wasn’t brilliant we moved on. Not long later – about 15 minutes we saw at least 7 lions cross the road in front of us. They didn’t hang around long and were soon in the bushes not visible from the road. We couldn’t believe it – how many lions were there along this road?!

We then saw some more road kill – a dead wild cat. This was very sad and it had obviously only just happened in the last few hours; poor cat.

We continued driving until we reached the dam near Satara where there were a few cars pulled up. We looked at what they were looking at and could not believe our eyes! Here, right next to us was a pride of lions with a kill; this would be our third lion kill sighting in 24 hours! They had caught a wildebeest and the male lion was feeding and refused to let the females have any. We watched them for a couple of hours as he fed, protecting it from the lionesses as well as watch the vultures wait patiently in the surrounding trees and the jackals sniff around waiting for a moment to sneak a bite.

We couldn’t get over how many lion kills we had seen; what a way to end our time in KNP. After a couple of hours we left the Dam and headed back to Orpen and the gate to leave KNP. On the way to Orpen Gate we saw a herd of zebras with an extremely small zebra that looked like it had been born fairly recently which seemed unusual as all the other zebra foals were much larger.