A year in review.
As the year edges closer to its final curtain call, it felt appropriate to look back at the moments — and more specifically, the stories — that shaped it. In short, what made this year what it was.
I firmly believe that we, as humans, are nothing more than a collection of memories. Our personalities, our ethos, the way we move through the world — all stitched together from moments. It’s what we share around a braai, what slips into business meetings disguised as anecdotes, and why we return to certain places time and again. Not for what they are now, but for what they once gave us.
So, without further ado, 2025 — in a nutshell.
The year began underwater and slightly unhinged. January through March belonged entirely to rain. Biblical, unrelenting, mood-altering rain. The kind that turns roads into suggestions and planning into a light-hearted fantasy best enjoyed with low expectations.
The bush responded the only way it knows how: by exploding into excess. Green everywhere. Birds behaving like they’d been handed an unlimited budget and absolutely no accountability. Elephants moved in as if Buffalo Thorn had been quietly rebranded into an all-inclusive resort for musth-addled bulls with a strong sense of entitlement and no concept of personal space.
Game drives became improvisations. Schedules were rewritten hourly. The simple act of getting from A to B often involved negotiating with several tonnes of opinionated grey flesh. But between soaked boots and rerouted plans, there was magic. Leopards materialised through rain haze. Cheetahs hunted successfully against the odds. Lions quietly got on with the business of survival.
The bush didn’t pause for the weather. It simply leaned into it — and in doing so, reminded us once again who actually sets the agenda out here.
As winter arrived early and without manners, the tone shifted. The cold came hard. Mornings bit back. The green slowly drained from the landscape, revealing the bones underneath. With it came clarity. Better visibility. Sharper sightings. Predator politics dialed up several notches.
Lions fought, lost, retreated, and reshuffled territories like disgraced politicians who swore this time it was different. One story ended violently. Another began softly, with impossibly small cheetah cubs appearing where absence had been mistaken for loss. Leopards, never ones to miss an opportunity, stepped confidently into the spotlight, offering prolonged, unhurried sightings that felt less like luck and more like repayment.
Even the unexpected made appearances. A python in winter. Elephants treating waterholes like social gatherings. Cheetahs posing theatrically on rocks, fully aware of their own marketing value.
It was a season of contrasts. Frost and firebreaks. Cubs and conflict. Long silences broken by sudden intensity. Nothing stable. Nothing static. Just constant adjustment.
By spring and early summer, the year revealed what it had been doing all along — building toward imbalance and abundance in equal measure. Heat arrived impatiently. Fires threatened. Trees flowered out of season. The Pilanesberg reminded us that this landscape operates on timelines far older, and far less sentimental, than our own.
Storms were swallowed whole by ancient ringed hills that have seen far worse than our concern. Minerals dictated grass. Grass dictated grazers. Grazers dictated where lions chose to lie down and wait. Rain returned in buckets. Sightings turned cinematic. The bush settled into its favourite state: chaotic, beautiful, and entirely unapologetic.
If this year taught us anything, it’s that nothing here exists in isolation. Geology feeds grass. Grass feeds buffalo. Buffalo feed lions. And somewhere in between, we sit. Watching. Adapting. Occasionally pretending we understand it all.
The year didn’t offer neat conclusions or gentle transitions. It offered continuity. Loss followed by birth. Excess followed by restraint. And always, underneath it all, the quiet understanding that this place doesn’t perform for us. We’re simply allowed to witness it.
And since the bush handed us so many reflections, it felt only right to turn inward — to the people who live this place daily, and the moments that stayed with them long after the dust settled.
Evan and Jumari quietly marked their sixth year at Buffalo Thorn this season. Management, reservations, guiding, elephant pond cleaner, emergency plumber, bush mechanic — titles become fairly meaningless out here, and they’ve worn all of them with impressive consistency.
I asked them, along with owner Dr. Alan Bougardt, to share their most meaningful memory of the year. Not the biggest sighting. Not the flashiest moment. Just the one that stayed.
For Dr. Bougardt, it came not from the bush itself, but from a passing comment that lingered far longer than expected.
A contractor came by my residence the other day. Practical, sensible, the sort of chap you trust with a tape measure. He stepped onto the deck, looked out, paused, and said, “You know, Alan, having a physical view like this adds years to your life.”
My first thought: This guy’s mad. About one rung down from believing walking under a ladder steals seven years from your life. And yet… I’ve always been drawn to views. Back in Atlanta when visiting with my brother-in-law, I’d drift toward the windows. The further I could see, the better. Give me distance, give me depth, give me something that makes my problems feel tiny.
And suddenly it clicked. Those surreal lodge moments — elephants moving through the trees in late light at Mana Pools — they aren’t just pretty. They do something to you. Reduced stress. A quiet recalibration of your nervous system. You stop staring at the ground and start breathing properly again.
Turns out, that’s why I built those lookouts at Buffalo Thorn. Sundowners and Crater View. Not because of the science, just instinct. But apparently, my brain knew what it was doing long before I did. “Adds years to your life,” indeed.
Jumari’s memory, fittingly, wasn’t a single moment at all — but an entire rhythm of life unfolding.
It’s impossible to pick just one moment that made my year. One fleeting scene can’t sum up twelve months in the bush. If I have to choose, I’d pick a whole season: the birth season. Watching all the new babies arriving, a fresh surge of life everywhere. And if pressed for a single memory, it would be the newborn warthogs. Tiny, full of energy, utterly innocent. Life in its most unpolished, chaotic, and oddly beautiful form.
I hope Evan knows Jumari is getting baby fever…
And finally, Evan’s standout moment — found not in drama or conflict, but in something extraordinarily rare and quietly humbling.
The standout memory for me this year? Two tiny elephant calves nursing from the same female. At that age, they’re supposed to be exclusively attached to their own mother, yet here were two, side by side. The longer we watched, the more it became clear: twins. A one-in-a-thousand occurrence.
In my fifteen years of guiding, I’ve never seen anything like it. Rare and utterly mesmerizing — the sort of bush moment that makes you pause and quietly marvel at the improbable.
And with that, the 2025 season comes to an end.
Objectively, it’s been a bit like a brick in a tumble dryer for most of us. But it’s these stories, these moments, that will outlast the hard times. The ones we’ll tell our grandchildren one day, long after the dust has settled.
From us at Buffalo thorn lodge may 2026 be the year of great sightings, heart stopping moments and fond memories.
The buffalo thorn team