No trip to Africa would be complete without a safari, so we booked to spend two nights at the Hilltop Camp inside the Hluhluwe Imfolozi National Park, which is a couple of hours drive north of Richards Bay. The World ARC arranged a day trip to this park, and we saw a lot of animals on this including three of the "big five" (buffalo, rhino, elephant) but we wanted to spend some more time there, seeing the animals during the morning and evening and hunting for the elusive lions and leopards.
The Hluhluwe park is a beautiful spot, with good views from the rolling hills, but the climate is quite lush in this area and it is sometimes hard to spot the game through the thick brush. We were resigned to not finding any lions when, on our final evenings drive, the guide got a radio call about a lion sighting and we set off at 60 kph down dirt tracks, breaking all the park speed limits, to find the lions. Twenty hair raising minutes later we found them snoozing right by the track, in a perfect photo spot.
One of the high points of our trip was seeing one of the rarest animals in Africa, the wild dog. They don't have such a high profile as other endangered species like the black rhino, but there are only a few thousand of these four-toed painted dogs alive today, of which 100 live in the Hluhluwe park.
Here is a selection of the animals we managed to find in the park.