Time to tell our story

Hello again!

Now that winter is coming and we have no more guests for the next week, we thought that it might be time to write a story again.

The month of April has been very good to us. We had a total occupancy percentage of about 30%. That was quite unexpected. Of course we knew that it would be better since we had Ank and Lukas (Kim’s parents) staying with us for 2,5 weeks, but we just didn’t expect to have a totally full lodge about 4 days of the month.

It was really great to see Ank and Lucas again. For Kim it was a emotional thing since she didn’t expect her parents to come that quickly already. They loved every moment of being in the bush and said that they would definitely come back again. Kim and her mom did quite a bit of gardening work together and Lucas and myself have been busy installing the new 5000 Litres barrel underneath the bungalow on top of the hill. Of course we went to the Kruger Park as well. We planned an overnight trip while we stayed at Satara. The highlight if this trip must have been the white rhino that we spotted in the late afternoon around one of the Satara dirt roads. After the Kruger, we took them on a day trip to do the panorama route and they went to Tshukudu to do the morning walk with the lions. The rest of the time they just helped us out wherever they could and enjoyed themselves. Thank you very much for your visit and look forward to seeing you again!

The wildlife is also still on the move. Besides the residential warthogs (we have a group of 9 that frequently visit the lodge every 2 days), the occasional bush buck and water buck, we saw several new things as well. During one night when we were braaing, Kim suddenly shouted “porcupine!”. It was standing right next to the braai area and we even didn’t see it until Kim mentioned it. Then it thought that it was time to split and boy can they run!
Another very special sighting was that I recently saw a caracal. This is apparently a very rare sight and my second already in Parsons Nature Reserve. Now the only thing I still need to see is the leopard. However I don’t believe in it anymore. I think they are just imaginary animals that are said to be there to attract the foreigner visitors. We did find out that there is a resident small genet in our garden. We have seen it already several times which we thought is really cool as well!

Thank goodness we didn’t see or hear any elephants in the garden during the night. We think that due to the amount of late rain that we had in April, they still don’t have the need to come and destroy our garden. This morning we went on a small game drive through Parsons since we heard from the security guard that there were 38 buffalos spotted again. Well, we saw the tracks and the shit but we didn’t see any buffalo.

Over the past five days we had several hippos including a baby in front of the lodge. That was such an amazing sight! Specially that noise that they make, it sound so pre historical, and boy did they call this time! We decided to put the evidence on youtube, so if you are interested, visit youtube.com and type in Kurhula. Than you can see what we saw!

Kim has been doing some kitchen work for Mpala lodge. This is an exclusive lodge that belongs to some people we befriend. Since they didn’t have a chef at that time, Kim volunteered since we didn’t have that many guests in the month of May. And all extra income is of course helpful!

About a week ago we found out that the sliding doors of room nr 1 and 3 were both very difficult to open. So yesterday I took them apart, and cut off about 2 mm with the saw from the top of the door. After having reinstalled them, they open again like a warm knife through butter!

Well folks, now that you are all updated on our stories, we just would like to say that it is so special to live in a beautiful place like this. We don’t need to become millionaires, because we feel already so blessed to live here day in and day out! Anyway, greetings from a still very green bushveld!