There is nothing quite like being woken up with sun rising over the sea and the sound of the waves crashing into the sand. Of course there was also the toddler shouting 'no' and singing that was reverberated around the house. It did feel like we had slept in though as we were usually heading out on a game drive but I was still lying in bed at 7am. H & S had decided to go...

Our time in game parks came to an end today. As we had a 4-hour drive to our accommodation on the beach (and nearer the airport), we decided to skip the morning drive and rather have a sleep in (at least for as long as Z allowed) and then a leisurely breakfast, walk around the camp, pack up and head out. We were on the road just after 9am and as we only had 12 kms...

As it was so cold and the birds weren't active at sunrise yesterday, we decided on a slightly later start of 7am. K wasn't feeling well so she gave the drive a skip but the rest of us headed out. The plan was to go to the Nsumo pan which has 2 hides overlooking the pan. We did visit them last year on our road trip and on going again today I remember that I would...

You might notice the spelling of Mkuze changes in my blog. That is because you can spell it multiple ways and they all acceptable. Mhkuze, Mkuze or uMhkuze. It is a isiZulu word meaning "chorus master of singing and dancing". I am not sure if Z knows that but there certainly has been a lot of singing coming from her over the last few days. She will just be sitting in the car while we are...

I realised as I pushed send last night that I forgot to mention the snake encounter in the blog post. Of course, almost as fast as I remember, it was pointed out to me as well. I said I would fix that problem. S & I were still up and at the dining room table catching up on things when I get a whatsapp from H with a photo and question underneath of "Worm or baby...

We were up and leaving at roughly the same time as yesterday around when the sun rose. The bushveld seemed even quieter this morning. It also didn't help that there was a thin layer of cloud. Cloudy conditions is never conducive to birding. It was also quite cool at around 15 degrees C. We only added our first new bird at after 7am this morning. We took a different route to yesterday and rather headed south...

Sunrise is at 6:40am at the moment so while the gates opened at 6am, we figured going out at 6:30am would likely be a better option. Z fortunately slept through the night and woke at 5:45am - which incidentally was when I woke up as well. We decided to head out east on the dirt road which runs along the river. As we descended into the valley, the mist was covering much of the valley and...