Our final game drive at Idube was great. No rain today, and lots of animals.

We had our final morning tea break at one of the many dams.

Then it was time to finish packing, and say a fond farewell to our friends. I wish they were able to join us at Kambaku.

Our driver, Jan, arrived and whisked us away on our 3 hours drive to Kambaku. If the road conditions had been anything like normal, the 60-mile trip should have taken a lot less time, but with potholes, cattle in the road, crazy taxi drivers, it turned into quite the adventure.

All the way, despite telling us that he would never discuss religion or politics with his passengers, Jan gave us his unsolicited opinion of the state of political affairs in South Africa. Brian listened patiently, I stared out the window watching the bustling townships go by.

Finally we arrived at Kambaku. Wow, now this is a fantastic lodge!

We were welcomed by the staff at the business office, and walked along the sand path to our room.

The room is absolutely beautiful, and I especially love the bathroom. It will be difficult to decide whether I am going to choose the beautiful claw foot bath tub, or the out-door shower.

Even the loo has a view!

Cordey, the manager, showed us around the beautiful main lodge and eating area. I know I am going to enjoy it here.

Over lunch Cordey apologized that we would have to share our game drive with another couple. We reassured her that as long as it wasn’t 6 other folks we were quite OK with that.

During lunch we were listening to her trying to communicate with 2 other guests. They had decided that safari life was not for them, and wanted to fly to Cape Town right now. Cordey let them know that it wasn’t that easy to just leave the game reserve and fly out, so they were very upset. She reassured them that they could probably get a flight out tomorrow morning. They wanted to go to Cape Town or Victoria Falls, and asked if the two were close together and could be visited in one day. It was finally settled that they would fly to Victoria Falls in the morning. They had been looking for shopping and night life. As all there is at Kambaku is a little (but great) souvenir shop, and night life consists of night time game drives – they were not really suited to safari life. I felt sorry for them, they were clearly angry about the situation. I blame their travel agent for not explaining what staying in a game reserve is all about. Now, if they had asked me……………

We settled into our room and got ready for our afternoon game drive. When we went through for tea, there was a wonderful assortment of snacks waiting for us. Good, it has been almost 2 hours since we last ate.

As the unhappy guests were not interested in a game drive we ended up having the vehicle to ourselves, which was fantastic, and we had a wonderful drive, taking our time to look at the birds and the impalas, with no need to rush to see a particular sight.

We saw a leopard in the bushes. She was well camouflaged.

Back at the  lodge, dinner was waiting for us. The 2 unhappy guests sat in the lounge area, but the rest of us were seated under the stars in the area in front of the lounge.

Our other fellow guests are 8 MBA students from UC Berkley who are here on a study program. They are having the best time, and totally love being on safari.

One issue with Kambaku is that there is only WIFI in the main lodge, not in the rooms, and the Wi-Fi itself is totally minimal. I suppose we should be OK with that as we are on holiday, but both of us need to keep up with work issues so it was a bit frustrating.

However, this is such a beautiful place, it’s really hard to find fault with anything 