Quite a drive!

Posting a year in arrears I cannot believe that this shot was taken 12 months ago.

I was fortunate enough to be offered a place on a sunset drive on the Eastern Shores of iSimangaliso Wetlands Park with Shakabarker Tours. We had some fantastic sightings of white rhino, buffalo, hippo and kudu amongst other mammals as well as brown snake eagles, sacred ibis and a variety of other birds.

We reached the viewing platform overlooking Catalina Bay in perfect time for one of those spectacular but very rapid African sunsets. The second half of the drive got underway with the help of two spotlights and we saw flap-necked chameleons, thick-tailed bush babies and even an African fish eagle perched up in a tree for the night.

Then we came across this guy. I'd been lucky enough to have a few leopard sightings in my time in South Africa but nothing that even came close to this. As we came to one of the pans at the end of Vlei Loop our guide Sakhile spotted this young male moving toward the waters edge. Sakhile killed the engine and rolled forward a little way and amazingly as we sat and waited the leopard just came closer and closer, completely unconcerned by our presence.

Apart from the clicking of shutters (mostly mine) we sat in silence for the next half an hour and watched as this beautiful animal, who looked as though he had eaten recently and heavily, drank from the shallows and appeared to catch and eat a number of frogs. At one point he wandered calmly in front of the vehicle, getting so close that I actually lost sight of him from the back seat!

An encounter I will never forget and fortunately when my cottage was burgled a little over a month later and my laptop and hard drives were stolen I didn't lose all the photos as I had given copies of some of them to Shakabarker Tours.

I was always going to struggle picking just one shot from a day like that and then along came the Blipfoto extra photo feature - how very useful!