Guest Blog: Rhulani the Leopard & Roaring Lion

Well, here we are back at nThambo for another fabulous 4 days! As always we had a warm welcome from Lily and the nThambo team – it was 35 degrees when we arrived so were thankful for a cool drink on arrival (well, Savanna and Castle to be precise). Game viewing has been fabulous, as always.

The bushveld is teeming with many herds of elephants – we’ve seen them playing, eating, drinking and cooling off in the midday heat. A first for us after 5 years visiting nThambo was an elephant drinking out of the swimming pool in the dark as we are all eating our dinner! There has been a herd of about 400 buffalo in the area, and we were lucky enough to see the whole herd cooling off and drinking in a large dam (so many buffalo that you couldn’t see the water).

Elephants engaging in some play fighting

A couple big bulls from the buffalo herd drinking at the dam

Lions have been harder to find. There are signs everywhere – roars, tracks, scat, and fresh urine, but the Trilogy boys were being a bit elusive! We eventually tracked 2 of them huddled together under some bushes and later tracked down the third one in the dark, roaring and then drinking from the dam. We’ve been lucky to catch up with Rhulani, a female leopard we first saw as a young cub. She’s now fully grown with cubs of her own (unfortunately she hadn’t introduced them to guests yet, as they are still very young). We caught up with her drinking and relaxing by a dam, before she was scared off by a herd of elephants.
Rhulani, the relaxed female leopard
Two of the Trilogy brothers seen on game drive
Trilogy male lion
That’s the big 5 ticked off again, as well as many others – giraffe, zebra, kudu, steenbok, warthog – to name a few. Oh! Almost forgot, we had a brief glimpse of a lone wild dog running down the road – even this short sighting was special, as there are only about 450 remaining in the wild.  As always, a memorable time in the bushveld and nThambo Tree Camp – our ‘home in the African bush’. See you all again in September.
A typical Kruger sunset seen at nThambo Tree Camp