Day 4 - Hlane National Park

Hlane day 1

Today we saw a male lion yawn. My new zoom lens got me so close I could see his tonsils (do lions have tonsils???) Let me start from the beginning.

We woke up to a lazy morning checking out of our beautiful lodge, after omelette and fruit for breakfast. Then our lovely driver Tom, the same one as before picked us up to take us onto our next stop, Hlane National Park. We went via the supermarket to stock up for our stay since we will be in the middle of nowhere.

We also made a stop at the Swazi candle making market, which had lots of stalls selling handicrafts. We bought a few bits including candles and some 'black mamba' spicy sauce (delicious) and then headed off for a 2 hour journey to Hlane.

We arrived at exactly check in time, 2pm and got booked onto 2 safaris tomorrow. There was no room on the sunset tour today. We were shown to our lovely little hut. It has a reed roof and a lovely BBQ area out the front. There is no electricity here, so there are a few gas lamps dotted around for later.

We went for lunch (toasted cheese sandwiches) and a beer, then we went to the shop to find out about wood for our BBQ, and ended up (at 3.28) booking onto the 3.30 sunset safari! They only have 4 safari cars for the whole park, so worried that we were holding people up, we ran to our hut to grab jumpers and then discovered that we had a while car to ourselves, with our driver, appropriately named Lucky.

There are different areas of the park and we opted for trying to see the lions, because Matt didn't get to see a male lion on his last trip here. It took us a little while, but in the beautiful glowing sunset we found 4 lions, 2 male and 2 female, just waking up from their snooze, hence the amazing yawning photos! They were just magnificent. Honestly, that safari was the best £20 I've ever spent!

We also saw huge elephants, with huge ears, as well as, wildebeest, impala, warthog and these birds; crested guinea fowl, crowned hornbill, forked tail drongo, southern black fly catcher, emerald spotted wood dove, green winged pitilia, blue wax bill, hooded vulture, black shouldered kite, grey hornbill and nightjar.

It was already dark when we got back, but someone had cone to light our gas lamps. We found fire wood and managed to get a fire going. Then some elephants appeared less than 50 feet from our hut! And we could hear lions calling to each other.

We BBQ'd the sausages and burgers that we got from the supermarket earlier and had them with the black mamba hot sauce. Delicious! Oh, and a cold radler too. It actually doesn't seem as cold here, though I did still have my thermal jumper on.

We heard some drums and went over to the restaurant area to investigate. The guides and staff were all in traditional clothing, singing and dancing to traditional songs around a fire. It was wonderful to see and hear!