3 - 4 May

Our afternoon drive could not start soon enough after such a great morning finding Mvula, Thandi and Xivambalane. The plan was to head west to see if the Styx pride was still on the buffalo kill, but as we got in the west it seemed it was a mutual plan for everyone. We headed towards Seef’s pan in search of elephants while we waited our turn to see the lions; there was only one young cow with an almost brand new calf. We realised we were not going to make the lion sighting as the sun was setting so we stopped for drinks, after our sundowner however, Salaye

xe was spotted not too far from us, we moved in to get a glimpse, and that is exactly what happened. She was quite far in the block so we had to off road quite a bit, we finally saw her as she moved off after some impala but with little interest. As we tried to follow the nimble cat our spotlight cable got caught in a small branch and snapped the cable. We were in complete darkness.
We moved out of the area as we could not follow her anymore with no spot light, luckily I had quite a strong flashlight with me for the trip back to camp. On the way we spotted something jumping off the road, as we got closer we realised it was a leopard cub! The young cub was following its mother Shadow. Happy to have seen them for a quick glance we made our way back to camp, and just in time as my flashlight’s batteries just died! Six leopards in one day always spells a great day!

This morning we stuck to our plan and headed back west to see the lions, and it was a great plan as we had them all to our self in the morning sunlight, the cubs were active and running around while the adults focused more on finishing the left overs.