St Lucia & Cape Vidal’s Glory

We woke up with the sunrise, as soon as the sun was out the tent started to bake. Then I lay there listening to what I thought might be birds fluttering about the car. Eventually I dragged my lazy butt out of bed to see a large troupe of vervet monkeys had descended on the camp and the car was covered with lots of little money
footprints. The cheeky buggers were digging through the bins and clearly would try to grab anything that might pass as food. They were hugely entertaining. In particular the young ones seemed to enjoy playing with each other and engaged in hide and seek and running around objects to catch each other. There were numerous
mother monkeys with very teeny baby monkeys clutching to their bellies. There was a lot of grooming going on, particularly picking fleas and ticks off each other’s bums.

While we were transfixed on the monkeys (Paul taking photos furiously) I heard a rustling in the bushes behind us. Low and behold, a whole family group of about 40 banded mongoose made their way through our camp. They used their little noses,
making grunts and snuffles, for digging out tasty bits in the ground and made little noises to each other and appeared to not be at all concerned by our presence. Ray Mears eat your heart out. There were numerous little ones again whose little legs whizzed them along as they tried to keep up with their parents.

That was all before breakfast.

It was only about 9am when we left the fenced area of Sugarloaf camp (after all that excitement) to find out what was there in daylight. We just passed the gate when we saw an estuary with crocodiles sunning themselves and hippos wallowing in the water. We kept pulling over to look at and photograph various animals: pelican, kingfishers, red duiker… By midday we reached the town where be pulled into the tourist tat shops and got sorted with flip-flops, baggies and a cooler-box. We were sorted and ready.

The rest of the day we went to Cape Vidal. This is a 30km stretch of land along the coast but it took us about 2 hours to drive to the end of the road. We had lunch on the beach and then drove back – and that took just as long. Again, we saw an abundance of animals: kudu, gnu, reedbuck, waterbuck, warthog, moneys, zebra and
more.

That evening we went on the turtle tour in which you have a guided drive in the evening through Cape Vidal, then a drive on the beach in search of turtles, and a night drive back. We were really lucky and saw a loggerhead turtle, but unfortunately she decided not to lay eggs and went back into the sea. They are extremely shy animals. We also saw rhino, hippo and buffalo – both rather exciting dangerous animals to see, especially the hippo on land.