Two of the Big Five

We went to Pilanesberg Game Reserve which is a 250 kilometer (3 hour) drive from our house.  We stayed at the Manyane Resort in a chalet within the confines of the reserve.  The resort was nice and about 1/2 the price of other resorts in the area.  I don't know what we were missing (tennis, jet skis?), but Manyane had everything we needed.  The resort had chalets of different sizes and a campground, which was very inexpensive.  When we arrived, the grounds were populated by baboons and ververt monkeys, which got the kids excited after the long drive.  I can only just imagine the excitement of tent camping around the baboons.

The MacLeod/Hopkins in our Never Too Late Basketball shirts hanging out at the watering hole.

After checking in, we had two hours to go game viewing before the reserve closed for the night.  On this first trip we saw wildebeest, giraffe, hippos, zebras, and impala.  The hippos were definitely the highlight of the afternoon as we saw three of them in a waterhole surfacing and then hiding in the water.

Not one of the big five.

That evening over dinner we decided that we would wake-up early and get into the park around 6:30 am, when the reserve opened.  We took a route that skirted the boundary of the park and for the first 30 minutes we saw nothing but some ordinary looking birds and maybe some zebras.  We were all getting restless when we came across two rhinoceros grazing in the bush veldt.  This got everyone's heart going and we continued on that morning seeing more zebras, impalas, giraffe, wildebeests, a common mongoose, a troop of baboons, warthogs, and a solitary little steenbok.

Neither is this one.

After eating breakfast and checking out, we went on another drive through the reserve.  Alexander and Quince had both expressed being done with game viewing, so we suggested that we just drive through the park on our way out.   We didn't see many new animals on the way through the park, but we did run into three or four elephants right by the side of the road.  We were able to get quite close to them.  We happened to go by the same area about 20 minutes later and we did eventually locate the elephants deeper in the scrub, but thought how lucky were were to see them when we did.

I realize that I don't have any photos of the big five because I did video instead.  Once I edit the video to an appropriate length, I'll post it.  It will be short because there is only so much excitement in watching animals graze.