Day Fourteen - Wakkerstroom to Mkuze

7:00am start to pop in a quick session of birding before breakfast. We headed up into the hills in subzero temperatures, our guide freaking out because the windscreen iced over and he had never seen that before. Clearly he's never been to Central West NSW.

We birded the roadside, picking up one new species, Drakensberg Prinia, and getting much better views of a few species we'd already encountered like Southern Bald Ibis and Cape Longclaw with their brilliant orange throats. We also checked out the wetland where we saw lots of African Snipe and picked up another two species for our list; Hottentot Teal and Little Bittern (a very hard bird to see especially in winter).

Another delicious breakfast at Wetlands Guesthouse, including creamed spinach, potato bake and nightshade jam. Yum!

The sand forest of Umkhumbi Lodge

At 10:00am we hit the road for Mkuze. Along the way we drove past heaps of eucalyptus and black wattle plantations, the trees are used for building material and firewood. Then as we got closer to the coast the roadside scenery turned into sugar cane fields and pineapple plantations. Amongst these we got caught up in a traffic jam for over an hour because a truck had tipped over on the road. This put us behind schedule and we rolled into Umkhumbi Lodge at about 3:45pm.

We checked into our rooms and then did a short walk through the sand forest. This is completely different habitat which means a whole new suite of birds and though the forest was very quiet this afternoon we did manage to find a group of Pink-throated Twinspot, very pretty little birds. Forest birding is completely different to what we've already done on this trip and it's going to take a bit more patience and skill to track them down, but with birds like Turacos and Trogons to look forward to it will be worth it.

Beef stew for dinner served in a three-legged potjie

To finish the day we got a new mammal, the dainty Red Duiker (rhymes with baker, Dutch for 'diver'). Very nice.

Dinner was baked cheese, followed by beef stew in a traditional three-legged potjie, and pear poached in red wine for dessert. So good.

Big Sis

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