What a drive this turned out to be.  On leaving the lodge we came across a large elephant bull slowly walking down the driveway we stayed with him until he moved off into the bush.  We then found four ostriches feeding in the open plain behind the lodge this is a rare sighting as they are normally only seen in the winter months in our area, they were fairly relaxed but we only stayed with them for a short while as we didn't want to put any pressure on them.  We then found a rhino bull wallowing in the mud at a pan close by.  But the highlight was finding a 3 - 3 ½ metre African Rock Python next to the road on closer inspection we saw that the python had been attacked by something this is really a spectacular species. 

We followed tracks from the python and found a leopard in a tree with her impala kill we can only assume that the python had killed the impala and then the leopard had attacked the python and stole the kill.  But the leopards victory was shortly lived as a hyena then came in and stole the kill from the leopard, this really was a remarkable sighting.  We left this sighting and found Karula's cubs (leopard) playing while mom was out hunting. We left them when the call came that Matimba (young male leopard) had been found, when we found him he was among a couple of Buffalo's with youngsters.  We then found a big male lion laying in the shade of a Marula tree but he was not interested in us and carried on sleeping.  We spent sometime with the Hippo's who once again offered us great photographic opportunities, we slowly started making our way back to the lodge for breakfast but we were first rewarded with a rhino walking down the road.  On returning to the lodge we had three Wild dogs run past the open area at the lodge, they were on the hunt this is an extremely rare sighting as these dogs are extremely endangered. Our afternoon drive started off with a young female leopard marking her territory and slowly sniffing out the area we spent sometime with her before she moved off into thick bush.  We had a great sighting of a small breeding herd of elephants as they slowly feed on Marula's next to the road, the were extremely relaxed.  We moved off to try and relocate rhino that had been called in but instead we came across Karula (female leopard) she was on the hunt but unfortunately was not successful.  General game was in abundance with sightings of giraffe, zebra, kudu and baboons.  On the way back to the lodge we found the five rhino that had eluded us at the beginning of the drive.  We followed up on the python but were unfortunately unable to find him but we assume that he had died from his injuries and that the birds and small animals had eaten him.