Still looking for the Leopard!

We drove with Joanne & Mark to Pilanesberg, a safari park about two hours from our house, close to Sun City.  Our family has still not seen a leopard in the wild so we went with a list of places where the leopards have been known to be spotted in the park. I even checked out some current sightings on various websites to see where people had reported them the day before. 

On our first day we saw...

baboons greeting us at the entrance gate,

warthogs at the place we stopped to book an afternoon game drive, 

3 big & 1 baby hippo at the dam

Giraffe

Herd of Blue Wildebeast and zebra bringing up the rear!

We stopped for an early lunch at a cool spot overlooking a giant hippo pool, looking through the binoculars we saw the same group of blue wildebeast & the lone zebra come up to the water for a drink!

Our lunch on the braii with cheese grillers cooked by the boys was wonderful.  The birds were amazing at the lunch stop, grey hornbills, and a ton of others, we had a bird book with us and had fun trying to figure out all of their names.  

One guy we talked at our picnic spot said there was a whole group of lion laying around at the one waterhole, we didn't have time to backtrack (we waited to go the next day but sadly the lions had moved on)

After lunch, we headed to the place we were staying for the night.  We were rushing so we would have time to check in before the afternoon game drive, but were stopped in the road for quite some time waiting for a lone elephant to finish demolishing a small tree for lunch.  He finally moved on, but it was cool to watch him eat!

Grey Hornbill

Finally moving on, part of his destroyed tree lying in the road.

Here is my scary parenting story...when you wish your kid wasn't in Africa!

Kelly was complaining a bit at lunch that her thumb was swelling up, having Joanne the nurse along was great, she checked it out..and we didn't think more of it.  However, after Greg, Joanne & Mark departed for the afternoon game drive Kelly kept getting worse and now the swelling (under the skin welts) were all over her body and she was in a ton of pain, she told me her lips were swelling and I started to look for a hospital. My GPS reported a hospital about a mile away, we got there and it was CLOSED, so the nearest one was on the south side of the park about 45 minutes away, and yes, the sun was setting and it isn't really safe to drive at night, especially when you are on back roads and you don't know where you are going!

So, with my swelling Kelly, we headed south...arrived at a public hospital and saw a different place than the private hospitals we have spent some time in for various things in Pretoria.  After a lengthy wait in the ER, which wasn't "hospital clean", a doctor came and gave Kelly a pretty strong drip to stop her reaction. (I glanced at the medicine box (all the medicine has different names here) but I was very happy to see the maker of it was Pfizer).

The doctor was quite busy, we saw a boy of about four come in with a long metal spike stuck between his toes. We listened as the doctor pulled it out.  Kids here rarely wear shoes, so this must happen quite a bit. I can't even imagine what else they deal with on a daily basis.

 They gave me a bunch of medicine for Kelly to continue to take and the nurse asked where we were staying and advised me that it really wasn't safe for us to be out, so to not stop anywhere and drive straight there.  Kelly was pretty groggy from the medicine, so I drove white knuckled the entire way home.  I was extremely grateful to the hospital crew and especially for their words of caution.  We were very happy to make it back to everyone, they were finishing a late dinner and we were able to tell them of our adventures and have Joanne check out Kelly's pile of medicine.  They entertained us with tales of the characters that joined them on the game drive, Greg, Mark & Joanne will be talking about them for years!  It took Kelly days, (and lots of medicine) to get the reaction to finally stop.  We also took her to the embassy doctor when we got back to Pretoria.  We still don't know if it was a bite from some strange insect that caused it or something she ate, I just hope it never happens again!

The next morning Joanne & Mark went on a solo game drive very early and we had a lazy morning and met them for breakfast to hear all about what they saw.  On our way out of the park we saw lots of rhino, at the waterhole we saw a bunch of hippo, including two babies, so adorable!  We also saw a male kudu with huge horns take a drink and some giraffe.

Baby hippo are so cute!  There are two lying down.

Before we left the park we found a few more rhino and one lone elephant...still no leopard!