Chichele Presidential Lodge South Luangwa National Park

... well as baboons stealing food from Kiwis.. Saw giraffes, mongoose, gennet, warthogs,
Saturday 22nd August Second day at croc valley. Beautiful campsite so relaxing and South lluanga NP full of animals. Also saw pride of lions by the river. Many hippos in the water. We enjoyed hours of bird watching by the river with Emma who was into the birds and helped me identify them including fish eagles, herons, egrets, plovers, geese, ducks.

... wider here than at Bridge Camp, and on the other side is South Luangwa National Park. Within the camping ground are a bar, swimming pool, and ablution blocks, washing up/laundry sinks. The overlanders have their own area. The staff were really nice and friendly and the welcome they give is lovely.

Now, you can’t walk from the camp to the restaurant at night, you have to drive there. Why? Well there is ...

... as Christina needed food badly.  Then to her house.  Lovely: she rents a 3 bedroom home in the bush very roomy and very secure with electric fences all around her and her neighbors with a groundsman, and nighttime guard.  So we feel very secure.
Our second day we went straight to the orphanges.  House of Moses first, the home for babies.  Very nice, very clean and very loving staff.  It reminded me of a gingerbread home.  It has been there for quite some ...

What a great day! I spent the morning sitting watching the other side of the river, I saw loads of animals from my perch as I said this morning. The good news is that the sleeping/dead ele WAS sleeping and eventually the lazy thing got up and disappeared into the bush! After bacon and homemade bread for breakfast we decided to leave to go into the park. The first thing I notice when we got in there was the amount of traffic - there wasn't much (well that was until we ...

... game drive. We were quite lucky to see several animals including elephants, giraffs, zebras, several types of antelope, lions, porcupines and one/maybe two leopards who had just made kills and were trying to get their kill into a tree. Unfortunetly for the leopard several (maybe 4-5) trucks spotted these poor leopards and all put their high beams and spot lights right on the animal. This appeared to disturb the leopard, so after 2 minutes our truck left as we did not want to ...

... of our tent. Every night, it was so neat/freaky listening to the sounds of the hippos in the river just 100 yards away. Sometimes, you would wake up in the middle of the night and hear lots of branches breaking right outside the tent and find elephant and hippo poop right by the door the next morning! Right after seeing that, I had a near death experience with a giant tarantula like spider that decided to take a shower with me (along with about 10 frogs). But that was ...

6th September - involved a drive along some very bad roads...debatable whether they are actually worse than the northern Kenyan Roads...but luckily far less distance...so the drive passed uneventfully and around lunch time we arrived at Flat Dogs Campsite...there were several elephants in the camp ground when we arrived...so we had to wait for them to move off a bit before we could dis-embark from the truck...we were briefed on the wildlife in the campsite and ...

... next morning, we took our first game-drive (what we would call a safari). It started at 6 a.m. and lasted for 4 hours. We took a vehicle that looks like an SUV with the top cut off and three rows of tiered seating. It's exactly what you would imagine on a safari. We saw hippos, elephants, giraffes, buffalo, four kinds of antelope, bee-eaters, lizards, crocodiles and zebras. We even saw a hippo out of the water, which I'm told is rare to ...

... visit is accomplished with the strains of "there was a red back on the toilet seat" floating through my head. The bed is in the middle of the room and is totally enclosed by a mosquito net, that is rolled up during the day. Oh, and don't leave anything outside in the bathroom or the monkeys will swipe it... but as long as the bathroom curtain is closed animals see it as a wall and won't enter. A true African experience? Wake up drum is at 0530, breakfast at 0545 and game drives leave ...

... fat hippos grazing, etc. Then we found a leopard!! It was amazing. The spotter found it in the middle of a thicket, and I have no idea how he did that. We followed it and watched it walk slowly out into the open toward the feeding impalas. We got so close to it! Maybe like 10 feet or less. So we actually watched it stalk and get really close to getting a kill, but for some reason the spotter shined the leopard and all the ...