We were missing the Kruger last weekend so we decided to head to the Pilanesberg National Park for a day visit.
The Pilanesberg is 2 and a half hours away from Johannesburg situated in the North West.
The Pilanesberg National Park is relatively small at 550km2 and it offers the chance to see as Big 5 as well as bucks that you don’t see at the Kruger including springboks.
This was our 4th visit to the park the 2 previous visits we spent the weekend at the park which is amazing because Sun City is right next door so we would go on a early morning drive around Pilanesberg and later on when it was too hot we would head to Sun City to relax and unwind at the Sun city pool and later on go on a afternoon drive.
The last few times we visited we saw the general game, brown hyenas and lions, we have never seen leopard or buffalo at the Pilanesberg.
Last weekend we woke up early and headed to the Pilanesberg on a Sunday morning, we drove inside the park for a while and we saw elephants, springboks , after a while we stopped at the Pilanesberg Centre for a coffee and we saw other visitors rushing to the outside patio and there a few feet away there was a lionesses drinking from a small waterhole and chasing jackals away as they had a carcass nearby.
While at the sightings we overheard some German tourists saying that they had seen two male lions earlier that morning, we asked their tour guide for directions where to find the male lions, so we headed to the intersection of Trou Drive and Sefara Drive and once we got to the place which was were the lions were spotted we could only see elephants at first and a few meters away we saw a whole lot of cars stopped so he made our way and that’s when we saw two cheetahs and while we were taking photos of the cheetahs out of nowhere we see one male lion chasing the cheetahs.
https://youtu.be/PrHFjwmV08g
At the beginning we could only see two cheetahs but apparently there were 3, and once the lion chased the two cheetahs that we could see across the sand road, he turned around and chased the remaining one, after a while the two cheetahs that ran across the road started calling the 3rd cheetah and together they ran the opposite side of where the lions were.
Once we finished to where the lions were, we once again stopped at the Pilanesberg Centre for breakfast, and the lionesses were still visible but only when they would come out the bushes they were laying under, at one stage two warthogs had gone to the waterhole to drink and out of no where the one lioness started chasing them (almost like the scene of Lion King when Nala chases Pumba).
We left the park around 1:00PM as it was hot outside and we thought we had a very good and exciting day and we already can’t wait to go back.
Thank you so much for reading