Guest Expectations
February 15, 2010 by Jean KZN
Here are two stories about guests expectations that somehow have no relation to ours.
Bheki did a game drive in Mkhuze Game Reserve yesterday evening with a family of eight. I met him when he came home and he was wide eyed about a Leopard sighting that they had witnessed. He stopped for a mixed herd of zebra and kudu that were showing signs of stress about something. Suddenly a big male leopard exploded out of the grass about twenty meters away and chased after the kudu. The kudu then realized that they were a bit to big to be leopard food and stopped to face the big cat down whereupon he promptly lay down and disappeared in the bush. I saw the guests at breakfast this morning and the conversation was along these lines:
“I hear you had a superb drive yesterday”
The answer:
“Yes we saw six Giraffes”
Me
“And the leopard chasing the kudu”
Them
“Oh! Yes one of those too”
Just goes to show
This morning I took two guests on a boat cruise. When they got on the safari vehicle the man said “I wish you were taking us somewhere more exciting in this”. I just kept quiet. The Cruise started with a magnificent tusker in the floodplains with a dead tree adorned with two fish eagles near the shore. Later after impala, zebra, wildebeest, warthog, reedbuck and hippo we found a large heard of buffalo. They were really close and some were lying in the water but the most beautiful was the large flock of cattle egrets floating around them (settling and flying up over and over) like snow flakes. The cruise ended with more than fifty elephants on the shore and three of the bulls swimming. At this point the client said “You could have warned me! I thought we were going out on a small dam and would be lucky to see a few hippo – This reminded me of Kariba”.