saturday afternoon at Amatigulu Natural Reserve

We spent the afternoon just down the road from here at the Amatigulu Nature Reserve. What an awesome afternoon. It is in Northern KwaZulu-Natal between the Tugela River and Amatigulu River mouths. It is one of the few parks that you can view wildlife feeding on the forested sand dunes overlooking the Sea. The Amatigulu river flows down towards the sea but then parallels it for some ways to form an estuary. The estuary was peaceful, quiet and just amazing to sit and soak in the sounds. There is a whaling tower that we tried to hike to but didn't quite get there. Our thought was that the tower would be built on the beach but it is actually located high up on the top of a sand dune. The ideas is that you need to be fairly high to see out far enough where the whales are. We also took a drive around the park and down to a "pan" where there were lots of Zebras eating the fresh, lush grass. We did come across two ladies who had hiked from camp down to the pan and had met up with a very curious giraffe. She kept getting closer and closer to them even though they were backing up away from her. The ladies were very glad to see us with the car and quite quickly hopped in (7 people in our very small Corisca light!) and since they were in and it was raining they thought it would be great to get a lift back to camp! We were glad to share our Canadian "niceness"! Below are some pictures from the day. The camping is a real bargain at 100.00 Rand per night per person. The enclosed tents are above the ocean with a magnificent view of the estuary!