CUSTOM photo safari to the Kruger, Mala Mala & Tswalu - August 2018
Posted by Wild4 Photo Safaris on 21st Aug 2018
This was a 10 night custom photo safari spent at three locations in South Africa, namely the Kruger National Park, Mala Mala and Tswalu Kalahari.
The tour began with the Kruger National Park where we had to endure some very unseasonal and cold weather. Some of our highlights in the Kruger were a pack of African Wilddogs, Elephant, Spotted Hyaena, Greater Kudu, a coalition of 4 male Lions and some great birds including the two smallest Owls, the Pearl Spotted and the African Barred.
Next stop was three nights at Mala Mala, here we were lucky to see the Kambula Lioness that has small cubs, she crossed the Sand River for us. We saw 4 different Leopards, a beautiful Nyala Bull displaying and a most incredible Lion experieince which involved two different prides fighting over and Impala kill and over territory.
Our final stay was at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve which really is a unique place with some very different species. Some of our highlights at Tswalu were the beautiful Roan and Sable antelopes, Giraffe, Tsessebe, Oryx and the African Wilddogs with their puppies. We also had a brief sighting of the rarely seen Pangolin. We managed to spend time with two different groups of Meerkats, both of which had youngsters with them, the youngest were only 3 weeks old.
Many thanks to the WILD4 TEAM for all your fantastic catering in the Kruger Park, the staff at both Mala Mala and Tswalu and to our rangers, Pieter at Mala Mala and Kyle at Tswalu - thank you for your patience and for working so hard to get us into some wonderful sightings and some great photos..
A huge thank you to our clients, Jon and Bernice for travelling with us on this custom photo safari.
Enoy some of the photos !!
Best wishes
Stu
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Justyna and Stu - I just wanted to take a moment to express my sincere thanks for again arranging a simply marvelous trip for us. It was perfect in all respects. And we were blessed with some truly amazing animal behavior to photograph. We had great skies, great camps, GREAT guides in David and Mamai, and great everything else. (including the new photo land cruiser)
Bruce Hollingsworth, USA
We recently travelled to South Africa for a safari led by Wild 4 African Photographic Safaris. To put things simply, we were completely blown away. I had been on safari before, and had expectations that I thought were reasonable, but Wild 4 completely exceeded those expectations in so many ways.
First of all, Justyna handled all of our travel and trip details with exceptional professionalism and always responded to even our most basic questions quickly and in a very detailed manner. Once we had arrived in South Africa, we were met by our guide Stu Porter, who I cannot say enough good things about. He is so organised and cordial. Stu was spotting things that we couldn’t believe that he was spotting, which almost always led to an amazing wildlife experience that we never saw coming. His knowledge and understanding of the wildlife and ecosystem was outstanding, and he went to great lengths to insure that we had the best chance of capturing a great photo, without compromising the rules of the park or the integrity of the animals and ecology within it. His understanding and respect for the wildlife and surroundings made the trip so much more than just a “drive around and look at whatever we see” kind of experience.
I know that you can never predict what kind of experience you will have when you go out into the wild, and often it’s up to nature to decide what events you will be a part of, but in all honesty, I can’t imagine a better guide than Stu Porter. We will be doing our future trips to Africa with Wild 4, and cannot recommend them highly enough. Thank you so much for what a lot of people call “the trip of a lifetime”, although we feel that this is only the beginning of many trips of a lifetime. Thank you, Wild 4!!
James Smith, USA
What fantastic sightings! - Including a pangolin - how special! Was the rhino carcass at Mala Mala another poaching victim?
Sharon Thorp - August 21st, 2018 at 11:02pm