South Africa and Swaziland, Christmas 2006

Toro Yaka - Take 1

Toro Yaka

Game Drives and Bush Walks

Toro Yaka

We entered the Balule private reserve, and headed on rough dirt roads towards Toro Yaka. As we drove, two male lions came out onto the road ahead of us and just lay down. They stayed for ages, until we decided enough was enough and drove towards them, so they finally headed off.

Toro Yaka was beautiful, with lovely colonial-style rooms with a king-size bed and full mosquito netting, all under thatch. There was also a pool, which was extremely welcome after the heat of the day. It's owned and managed by Nicole and Steve: Nicole is an excellent cook, and we had the first of many wonderful meals that night, and a large amount of wine (well, that could just have been me).

The next morning we were woken at 4:15, half of us for a game drive, the others for a game walk. I had elected to go on the game drive, and we were driven to another meeting place where we were due to be picked up by Siyabona for the drive. There is an issue with traversing rights in the reserve: essentially, there are plots of varying sizes and some of the larger land-owners will not allow the smaller land-owners to drive through their plot. This means you have to use the larger land-owners when you want to go on a game drive. There was a mix-up with our booking, so we waited for around an hour to be picked up, and entertained ourselves by taking way too many photos of some monkeys that were hanging around the pickup point.

Finally our driver turned up, and we set off. The two existing passengers (a young Norwegian couple) were not too well disposed to us, having left a lion hunt to come and pick us up, and later in the drive words were exchanged between some of our party and Norwegian girl. And after that, no words were exchanged between anyone for the entire duration of the drive, so that was fun too. We didn’t see too much, although a large breeding herd of elephant made up for that.

We headed back to the lodge, and relaxed, swam a little, had lunch, before heading out for a game walk (the other half of the group headed out for their game drive – rather more successful than ours had been, they were picked up on time, had the jeep to themselves and saw loads of animals. ) The game walk was great, although I had been very nervous about it after the Swazi walk/trek, it was relaxed and not too strenuous at all. Steve taught us about the various tracks we saw, and the birds we could hear.

Then back to the lodge and another great dinner.

The following morning we had another early wake up call, and all set off another bush walk. After breakfast we were headed to the Kruger. Luckily for us (although possibly not for Nicole and Steve), there were no guests expected at Toro Yaka while we were in the Kruger, so we could leave stuff in our rooms.