HOT, HUMID AND HIPPOS IN TOWN

Staying in St Lucia on the east coast just above Durban. surrounded by huge wetland area of lakes and swamps, and teeming with wildlife and birds. The town consists of a main street with a few restaurants and shops and backed by several streets of houses and places to stay in lush bush. We are still waiting to see the hippos walking in the main street at night, maybe next 2 nights!

We chose our guest house (Parkers) off the internet (this is our room)

highly recommended on Tripadvisor and rightly so, beautiful room and shower, great breakfasts, pool, wifi, beach towels, cool bags for trips to the beach, dining room can be used for takeaways, and amazingly helpful owners. Plus all my laundry done and ironed!

Their main work is organising first time self drive trips across much of Africa (not just SA) and if they pay as much attention to detail as with the guest house, it would be well worth letting them organise your trip. http://www.parkertours.co.za/

We went for a meal one night at the Ocean Buffet, as recommended by Lorraine and Chris, good recommendation, thanks!

The wildlife and birds have been amazing, mostly done on our own with walks and drives out for the day, Graham’s self drive safaris and only £8 for the entry to the Park for a day. Some of the animals include

The hippos are a few feet away from the garden of the restaurant where we were having our pizza.

Today we went on a 3.5 hr walk in the bush on our own (see below) and saw impala, wildebeest, zebra, tortoise, waterbuck, warthogs and more, and plenty of birds, pretty exciting stuff and felt very brave!

BIRDS GALORE

A few pictures for the birdwatchers amongst you, just fantastic birdlife, we could sit all day on our balcony and see birds like these hornbills, 3 different sorts so far. Don’t even need to leave our wine and beer! And a big THANK YOU to Kate and Gareth for their Christmas present of a detailed bird book and to Lorraine and Chris for their borrowed one, we need them both and even then have to ask the Ranger for the really difficult ones.

Also seen lots of birds of prey, luckily we had a ranger to help us out with what they were, difficult as always. Even the brightly coloured ones cause problems, there are pages of yellow birds just when you think you must be able to find that one! This woolly necked stork below was in a water hole with dozens of kites flying around and several other large water birds, it got attacked by the kites but not sure they were after a baby or just its food.

The bird count and list is increasing by the hour, positively exhausting, and writing this after only 2 days (will be posted a few days later when we get to wifi land again), the wetland area is still to come.

TWO SURVIVORS

Spent 3 days at Hluhluwe Park (pronounced shushlooi I believe), a few hours north of Durban, and took two safari drives, one in the evening and one the next morning at 5 am. The animals were fantastic and really close to the vehicle and included elephant, black rhino, buffalo, giraffe, zebras, nyala and troupes of baboons. At some point I will get piccies of them all downloaded to Picasa and put a link at the side of this blog. As a taster these black rhino

mother and baby were almost sweet!

On one of the drives there was a family whose father had been brought up in a township 30 years ago, worked for 15 years for someone and then set up a hardware shop. He now has 2 shops and his son manages one and will be taking over the business soon. He loved South Africa and was so proud of his son, staging the World Cup, the wildlife and the country and was now paying for his family to stay for the third time in this wonderful park.

Then this pregnant zebra stopped right by the vehicle and you can see scratches on its neck and big healed wound on its side where a lion has sat on its back attacking it

A tale of two survivors in South Africa.

B&B in Durban

Flights out to Durban were fine and we arrived at a great B&B, Goble Palms Guesthouse, recommended by Gareth and Kate and where the family stayed last summer before their own South Africa adventure. Brilliant place and a wonderful wind down after busy day and long flights

Here is a link to their website

Now at Hluhluwe Park in a lovely self catering lodge just north of Durban, but no wifi here so only a computer connection at the main reception. So no piccies or blog updates for a few days, then hopefully some game that we see on tonights and tomorrow mornings safari drives.

Brilliant for birds though, just sit on our balcony and watch the hornbills and others fly past. the monkeys met us at the front door so keeping doors and windows shut! Lovely pool just near our lodge, a bit different to our normal YHA's and cheapo living in New Zealand.