The Greater St Lucia Wetlands Park, up the north coast of KwaZulu Natal towards Mozambique, became South Africa’s first Natural World Heritage Site in 1999. Rob and I visited in December of 2012 – it was one of those rare places where a hippo might wander through your garden at night, where leopards hang about on the edges of town, while crocs are thick enough to form a bridge across the muddy water, if you’re dumb enough to try it.

For one reason and another, I never seemed to have time to really work through the photos from the trip, so here is a project for the next couple of posts – some images from St Lucia. We start in a rather low key way, but will progress to close-ups of hippos, I promise.