The park from our side of the lake
Western Shores Game Drives
Open-vehicle drives through fig forest, grassland and pans — giraffe country, with elephant, rhino, buffalo and, after dark, an entirely different cast.
The Western Shores is the quiet side of iSimangaliso, and it is ours: game drives leave from the lodge and are in the park before the day starts. The country changes every few minutes — fig forest to open grassland to seasonal pans — and it carries giraffe (which the Eastern Shores does not), elephant, white rhino, buffalo, zebra, kudu and waterbuck in numbers.
We are honest about what this is not: a lion-per-drive reserve. For that we run full days to Hluhluwe-iMfolozi, an hour away. What the Western Shores gives instead is variety, birdlife that borders on absurd, and drives where yours is often the only vehicle in sight.
Night drives turn up the smaller nations: genets, bushbabies, chameleons caught in the spotlight, owls on the road posts.