Back from Africa!

Just back from spending 47 wonder packed days in the "Dark Continent".  My purpose of being there was threefold, to enjoy a late honeymoon with my wife, Lori; to inspect and develop the curriculum for a University study abroad class I will be leading next year; and to investigate areas for future photo tours.  For an animal/photography nut it was like being in the world's largest amusement park, animals and landscapes every where to photograph.  I spent about 2 weeks in the Kruger area south to Kwazulu-natal and and an equal amount of time in the East Cape of South Africa.  I was also able to get over to Namibia for 8 days.  For the purpose of future photo tours I stayed at 3 separate lodges. Two luxury lodges run by And Beyond, Kirkman's Kamp in Sabi Sands, and Phinda where I stayed in both the forest and mountain lodges.  I have never seen such service and the photography opportunities were above my expectations.  We saw leapords on 7 of 8 game drives at Kirkman's, and at Phinda I photographed 15 different cheetahs which we saw each time we went out.  I also stayed at Tshukudu Lodge near Hoedspruit outside of Kruger which offers some different venues for photography with habituated and captive animals along with numerous completely wild animals.  It is frequented by photography tours monthly due to their unique facilities.  I want to visit some more areas before I put a photo tour together so I'm hoping to visit some areas in Botswana next year before my class comes over.  By then I should have a good "feel" for the southern Africa area and be able to lead an excellent tour in 2015.  I will be keep posting photos both here and on my facebook site, and have over 8000 I still need to sort through as I just got back 2 days ago.  I've only found time to process a few but below is a represenative of the Big 5, which I was fortunate to see all 5 on 4 different days.

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