PILANSBERG NATIONAL PARK

 Vicky and I arrived at Sun City early enough to browse around before checking in for our 4-7 p.m. game drive.  It is a resort type of place, sort of like a bad Las Vegas, with time shares, water park, casinos, etc.   There are many private lodges with entrances to the park at other locations, but this is where National Park game drives originate, and also is the nearest at just two hours from my place.  Game viewing was, unfortunately, pretty slim pickins.  The Park does have the Big Five, but we did not see any of them.

Giraffes in the distance, a few zebra fairly near the road, lots of antelope, as always...but they have many different types here.  One is the Kudu, which makes good biltong (jerky) I am told, so plan to try that soon.  This lovely impala was entranced by something towards the lake.


The warthog also had a stare-down contest with us before he trotted away.

The best was this group of wildebeest very near the road.  Totally unperturbed by our presence.


This is the way of larger open game reserves; sometimes you'll get lucky and see a lot of animals, and other times, not.  At smaller private reserves there is less area for them to roam so more likely to see everything, as I experienced a few years ago.  It got very cold the last hour of our drive when the sun went down.

We had to drive about 30 minutes in the dark to our lodging for the night...a hotels.com redemption of mine, and I was a bit apprehensive about what we'd get, although it sounded good on the website, and it was!  A great country lodge atmosphere but with very modern rooms (including a big bathtub which I greatly enjoyed!), great buffet breakfast!  Another nice outing.