For some strange reason they only allow bookings for Saturday night. So we left on Saturday morning and went straight to the place, trying to miss as many toll gates as possible. I wasn't too succesfull in that, managing to only by-pass the one near Nylstroom by going through Warmbath.
Nylsvlei is well known for its bird life concentrated mostly around the vlei area dotted with a number of bird hides. The rest of the reserve is bush and very few hills. Walking was a pleasure since there were no ups that take ones breath away.
The first hike took us to the bridge that crosses the vlei, actually it's not a bridge at all, but it is shown as such on the map. It's just an elevated road over the vlei. And here we came to the first bird hide. Nice place, elevated above a wet patch. We hardly saw any birds there, but then again I only stayed there for about 1 minute. Birdhides are not my favorit location, one has to keep quiet in there.
Some of us went on further, that were those lusting for a decent hike. So the four of us, Jörg, Jenny, Jaqueline and me went on to complete the loop by following the wetland on the south crossing back over just before the fence. It was here that we had a snag. There was a fork in the road which was not shown on the map, which one to follow? We made a choice by drawing a stick and naturally followed the wrong road. This one went up to and through the fence onto a road. What was to be done? We couldn't follow the GPS because my GPS ist kaput. So we figured that if we follow the fence we should eventually get to the camp, and that we did. It was a bit rough going at places when we had to cross a wetland and take a shortcut through the bush after spotting the camp.
The evening required some fire experts to get the braai going properly, of course everybody is an expert: Oscar, Roger, me, Frans, but finally the job had to be handed to a woman, Maja. She managed to get our meat cooked.
The remainder of the evening was filled with a slide show by Jörg of his successful Kilimanjaro trip.
And the next day was going to be a round trip on the south side of the vlei. We missed the initial path going east but only noticed that when we came to the second one. So we followed this one, after all we knew what we were doing. It worked out ok. I think it was on this day that we picked up most of the ticks, my legs certainly were full of bite marks.
And that was that, we took our time having lunch and packing, it was going to be a short trip back home.