Embarking on our tour with master tour guide Greg Garson, we headed north up the coast to Saint Lucia, and went to the estuary (a world heritage site) where hippos and crocodiles are in abundance.

Then on northward to the Hluhluwe Game Reserve. In an approximation of the Zulu pronunciation, you can get away with shu.SHLU.wee. Tough for foreigners to put the spelling and the sound together! This is the oldest game reserve in South Africa, dating back to the late 1800’s. It is about 370 square miles. It has been instrumental in restoring the greatly endangered (once fewer than 100 animals) white rhino.

In SA you cannot drive off the road to approach animals. In Zimbabwe and Kenya, when an animal is spotted it is often surrounded by Land Rovers. Here you may have to watch from a distance, and thus see scenes like this…

But we were pretty lucky in our “hunting” over two days, so here are some of the trophies…

We visited a place where four species of endangered cats are bred and reintroduced to the wild. In particular the cheetah, which is between a rock and a hard place. They need the game reserves to have protected habitat, but unlike many cats (such as the leopard), they don’t climb trees and thus they cannot escape the reserve. As a result they become inbred with the limited gene pool within the borders. So controlled breeding is important for the survival of this amazing creature.

Back in the wild, we saw just one cat…a lion…

All the big animals are fantastic, but for me the most amazing is this one…out of proportion…yet elegant and graceful…curious about us…and hard for me to believe it exists for real on the same planet I do!