A once in a lifetime experience

9th October 2013 • By James Bailey

Tuesday 8th October 2013

Game drives can’t get any more special, in fact this was probably a once in a lifetime experience.

We spent over two hours with a cheetah and her four cubs. The greatness of the experience wasn’t because of how close we were or even that we were on foot but because she and her cubs showed complete acceptance of us.

We responded to a sighting of a cheetah hunting, when we got there she’d made her kill, a common duiker.

We parked up and watched jealously as guests from one of the lodges came onto the scene on foot, luckily after fifteen minutes they moved on and we had the cheetahs all to ourselves.

We went and sat within 15 metres and then as the morning went by both us and the cheetahs moved around until at one point there was barley two or three metres between us.

Once they’d finished with the kill they groomed one another and the cubs played.

Over two hours they completely stripped the carcass, simply leaving skin and bones as the only evidence. There would have been more to show of their presence but one of the cubs left with the head as a play thing.

Only when we started to make our way back and not a moment before we gave a thought to Group A and how this blew all their leopard sightings clean out of the water.

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