Nyalamonster
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Triple buffalo hunt in Matetsi 5, Nov 2021
Outfitter: @MARTIN PIETERS SAFARIS
Dates: November 14-22
P.H. Martin Pieters & Ross Johnston
Concession: Matetsi 5
Plan: 7 day buffalo hunt (x3 hunters)
Rifles used: 375 H&H, 404 & 458Win
Game Taken: Buffalo (x3), Kudu, Zebra, Warthog, Baboon (x2)
Game Seen: Buffalo (thousands), Elephants, Lions, Baboons, Bushbuck, Civet, Crocodile, Duiker, Hippo, Impala, Roan, Jackal, Kudu, Sable, Warthog, Waterbuck, Wild cat, Zebra
Overall experience: 5/5 (highly recommended), DM for references
I’ll divided this report to couple major parts so anyone looking for info about Martin’s operations, travelling or general in Zimbabwe will have the best opportunity to get most out of this text. Sorry for the typos as I'm not native english speaker..
TRAVELLING TO VICTORIA FALLS:
AfricaSky helped us all the way with papers. Leoni and her main guy in airport Gilbert, were super! From now on will use them always when travelling to SA. AfricaSky was nice hotel establishment with good quality rooms. All felt also very safe. Thank you Leoni and Gilbert!
Paperwork in Johannesburg went without hitches when travelling to Victoria Falls as Gilbert took care pretty much everything. Problems started when we were boarding the Fastjet plane in tarmac. There we were informed by the Captain, that he can only take one case of ammo on board. That was of course batshit crazy as we were three different hunters, with three different calibers and had done everything to the point of aligning us with Fastjet Firearm regulations. There wasn’t any problems when checking in at airport counter, all was good – captain just thought differently. Everyone of us had between 3-4kg of ammo (limit in Fastjet webpage was 5kg per person) in separate locked container.
We had a heated discussion with the captain and demanded to know why he is setting his own set of rules not aligned with company policy. This went back-and-fort as we pegged him not to destroy our dream of hunting buffalo as it would be impossible to get ammo this short notice for 404 and 458. Finally (reasons unknown to me) the Captain said that load the crap on-board and lets go. Of course we were happy as hell, but that left us with constant worry of what would we face on our flight back to Johannesburg after the safari. More on that later.
Paperwork in Victoria Falls Airport went without problems and actually was pretty pleasant. All personnel working there were very nice and we had couple of good laughs. I really hope more tourist will be inbound after the COVID shit, as its struggle for local people when the whole tourist industry capacity is almost offline. Overall very good people in Zimbabwe, very helpful and nice - thank you for that!
THE CAMP:
View from the camp's "fireplace"
THE HUNT:
Hunting wild buffalo in Zim has been the dream for our group for many many years. For this trip we decided to skip agents and book trip straight from Outfitter. After around year of doing due diligence and talking with many Outfitters we decided to go with Martin Pieters Safaris. It was a hard choice between Martin and Mokore Safaris, whom I want to mention here also as Gary from Mokore demonstrated also great customer service and I’m very thankful of that.
The moment I met Martin outside of Victoria Falls airport, I just knew we made a good choice and this would be epic! That first intuition proofed to be right as the trip was one for history books. We are so grateful for Martin and Ross (+whole team), for building us experience we will never ever forget.
Before we got moving from the airport to the camp, the intros were made. Martin and Ross asked us that have we been hunting in Africa before. One of our guys, (joker from God’s mercy) said that he’s killed over 500 buffalos before this trip. That remark was met with a long silence before he added “with Playstation”. After that he was dubbed as a Mr.Playstation for the rest of the trip (followed comments in the heat of hunting “come come, this is not a fucking video game” ). All good and fun!
First morning we started with checking the guns. Again it was demonstrated why this step is so crucial as one of the guns was shooting as bad as blind Joe. Action was separated from the stock to get it in to the gun case. When it was put back together in Zim it was totally off. With good organization skills and experience, the PH’s set the scene so that problem was mitigated and the gun carried on to put one buffalo down during the trip. With that the hunting started!
A LOT of buffalo was seen, inc. these young ones
During the 6 hunting days, we coved a lot of kilometers. The amount of buffalos in Matetsi 5 was incomprehensible, as there literally were thousand to be seen every day. I personally could not believe how much there actually were, as I have thought they are much more scarce. Martin had given us heads up of the amount of game, but still it caught me by surprise. Biggest hoards probably had some 1000-2000 heads. We even saw a Dagga Boy group that were 29 strong (all shooters…..). They really seems to like the Matetsi 5 with all the water and food. Martin also takes good care of area and the animal population, and one can really see it.
Hunting was done sport and stalk. First and second day, we covered a lot of klicks with foot and by trusted Toyota’s, but could not locate right bull or just on the final moment wind shifted and we only saw dust after that. PH’s ran a very strict quality specs for bulls to hunt ethically and to support population strength. All bulls hunted needed to be mature, past-breeding age with solid, hard bosses. The older the better. And all three were just that.
Lion kill and sanitation crew
On our trip, third day was truly a super day for our group. All hunters had their buffalos during that day. One in the morning and two in the late afternoon. Mine was even better, as I got a nice kudu in the morning and buffalo in afternoon – could not ask much better!
We spotted kudu resting under tree around 08 in the morning with couple of smaller bulls. We left the car and started our stalk. It was already +35 Celsius at that point and hot as hell. The distance was around 700m and we had a good wind. Before we could close the distance, the bulls took off (nobody knows why, ghosts) and with that, we were hot on their tails. We tracked them maybe 2km and got up to them just when they were going over the hill. At that time, the group was joined around 10 bulls. I was on the sticks, but we just couldn’t line up ~150m shot before they went over.
Off the sticks and again running after them. Our trackers then did great job to circulate and to put us ahead of them. We then stayed put and waited before they appeared on opposite hill around 100m distance. Before shot, we needed to do a fast readjustment on our location to get clear shot through some bush. Martin located good bull and I did a rush job… shot was low but the bull marked it. I saw the bull run over the hill and thought fuck, this will be a tricky one. I absolutely hate when bad shots happen, makes me feel sick to my stomach for the animal. Lucky that we had a great team of trackers with us. They were hot on its tail right away after the shot and we located the bull momentarily in a slope. High knee, one shot and we thanked the kudu for everything.
After lunch and rest, we continued chasing the buffalo. When we were driving back to camp with kudu, we saw a group of six dagga boys in distance. Martin and trackers figured that in the late afternoon they would still be laying down and we could sneak very close to them to look for shot opportunity when they started to move again. That plan worked like a charm! We left the car around 500m from the general area where bulls were last seen and continued by foot. Pretty soon we located the group and started to close the distance. To be super careful, last 50m needed to done crawling.
We got to about 30m from the group. They were laying down just other side of small hill. At the same time we sat down, thunder started to close in. Good dammit, if the thunder fucks this up! In the group, there was estimated 43” bull that we REALLY wanted to get. I was sure the thunder will mess that opportunity, but in the end, thunder was just a lot of noise but no real problems. Around 3:30pm the group stood up and started to feed downhill. At that time we just couldn’t get a shoot as the big bull was all the time in bad angle or covered with other bulls. No worries, we figured - they are moving down to the valley and we could easily intercept them as wind was good.
Watching the group of Dagga boys
Of we go! We navigated the bush and started to approach the bulls again. But surprise surprise, the bulls were nowhere to be seen on the place we were sure they were headed! What the hell? Again trackers did magic and in the end we figured that there were a group of buffalos below the hill and the dagga boys joined them. With no time after that Sherlock Holmes work we located the big group and started to fallow them. It was an interesting two hours with the group. We were under 100m from the group multiple times (closest 15m) and I was on the sticks twice, but both times there weren’t a shooter in sight. We knew there were shooters in the group as it was around 200 heads strong and the dagga boys had joined them earlier.
River "valley" where we met the buffalos
Finally the group headed to dry river valley with us in their tails. We crossed the dry rivel to opposite bank and started to work to be ahead of the moving group. When moving, our tracker noticed some buffalos on the opposite bank lying under a tree. Distance at that time was around 200m so we knew that we need to get closer to confirm it’s a good bull. Crawling again. We did around 100m in hands and knees, all the way to the bank of dried river. Martin set up the sticks and up the Blaser R8 went. While Martin and trackers were estimating the bulls on the opposite bank we noticed the main group working their way on the dry rivel and first buffalos started to walk past of us in just 20-30m distance. Finally Martin decided that the bull laying under the tree in opposite bank wasn’t good enough. We shifted our attention group moving on the dried river. Then almost as a lighting from the sky, Martin excitedly said to me: that beast, shoot it and shoot it now! I located the bull easily due to its size and send 300gr Barnes bullet on its way! BOOM, we heard the hit while rest of the heard started running. First 2 second I though the bull started to run with the group, but very fast those thoughts were forgotten as we heard a loud “below” and new the game was over! We started to approach the buffalo with million emotions. The bull only went 10m due to heart shoot. It crashed on river rocks and rested there, with multiple chips from horns around it. I was so happy, one dream done – first Cape Buffalo. Could not be done without Martin and his teams great efforts!
Old bull, thank you
Rest of the team also shoot buffalos that same day, so one could imagine the mood in campfire that evening was cheerful one J We continued to hunt other species after that and ended safari one day early to visit Victoria Falls (highly recommended, great destination)!.
Triplets
TRAVELLING FROM VICTORIA FALLS:
We went to Victoria Falls one day early, as we really wanted to see the Falls. Our group stayed in Sheerwater Explorers Village, near the Falls. It was a really nice hotel and very new. All worked like a charm and it was easy e.g. to arrange PCR testing visit us at the hotel.
We also visited Martin’s restaurant called Three Monkeys in Victoria Falls. Nice and exotic setting, based on old train cart. Cocktails were good and food even better. Especially Kudu carpaccio was really good!
After nice couple of days, all went to hell due Fastjet. We were waiting to leave to airport in two hour’s time, when hotel management came running to get us. Never a good sign. The informed us that Fastjet had cancelled the flight due to “low amount of customers”. It's is quite funny, that they couldn’t notify us e.g. previous day so we could have joined that flight. Nothing. News came only around four hours before flight. The offered to reroute us to Harare with “hope” they could get us to flight to Johannesburg at same evening. Also they remember to mention first thing, that they won’t take any responsibility to cover any of our costs due to the cancellation.
At that time we opted to stay one more night in Victoria Falls as they said, there will be “most likely” flight tomorrow to Johannesburg. For the whole night we kept our fingers crossed that the flight would happen. In the end, we were so relieved when the flight really left from Victoria Falls. I was really disappointed with the Fastjet all the way and will contact them later on to discuss this matter. Its sad as they could really have competitive advantages carrying hunters and their guns, if they just would run a proper show. There isn’t that many options to travel with guns from SA to Zim during the Covid times.
FINAL REMARKS,
Was our group happy for the experience? Hell yes! I would highly recommend Martin Pieters Safaris to anybody who’s looking great safari conducted (anywhere) in Zimbabwe. I couldn’t image the amount of buffalos we saw during the week and the superb professionalism Martin and his team demonstrated. We will be back in near future to continue chasing buffalos!
Cheers for a great trip! And thank you all for the info shared on AfricaHunting, helped me tremendously to plan this trip!!
Outfitter: @MARTIN PIETERS SAFARIS
Dates: November 14-22
P.H. Martin Pieters & Ross Johnston
Concession: Matetsi 5
Plan: 7 day buffalo hunt (x3 hunters)
Rifles used: 375 H&H, 404 & 458Win
Game Taken: Buffalo (x3), Kudu, Zebra, Warthog, Baboon (x2)
Game Seen: Buffalo (thousands), Elephants, Lions, Baboons, Bushbuck, Civet, Crocodile, Duiker, Hippo, Impala, Roan, Jackal, Kudu, Sable, Warthog, Waterbuck, Wild cat, Zebra
Overall experience: 5/5 (highly recommended), DM for references
I’ll divided this report to couple major parts so anyone looking for info about Martin’s operations, travelling or general in Zimbabwe will have the best opportunity to get most out of this text. Sorry for the typos as I'm not native english speaker..
- Travelling from Europe to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. AfricaSky and Qatar were superb, Fastjet from Johannesburg to Victoria Falls terrible
- Experience of lifetime with Martin, Ross and great team! It’s always great to rely on really experienced PH to make sure everything is well taken care and safe – Thanks Mart
- Travelling from Victoria Falls to Europe. Qatar and Martin’s team’s help super (and we really owe them), but Fastjet again totally useless. Will never fly with them again. Extra tip: we stayed in Sheerwater Explorers Village in Victoria Falls, very nice place and had safe room for storing guns.
TRAVELLING TO VICTORIA FALLS:
- Europa-Doha-Johannesburg with Qatar
- One night in superb Africa Sky
- Johannesburg-Victoria Falls whit Fastjet
AfricaSky helped us all the way with papers. Leoni and her main guy in airport Gilbert, were super! From now on will use them always when travelling to SA. AfricaSky was nice hotel establishment with good quality rooms. All felt also very safe. Thank you Leoni and Gilbert!
Paperwork in Johannesburg went without hitches when travelling to Victoria Falls as Gilbert took care pretty much everything. Problems started when we were boarding the Fastjet plane in tarmac. There we were informed by the Captain, that he can only take one case of ammo on board. That was of course batshit crazy as we were three different hunters, with three different calibers and had done everything to the point of aligning us with Fastjet Firearm regulations. There wasn’t any problems when checking in at airport counter, all was good – captain just thought differently. Everyone of us had between 3-4kg of ammo (limit in Fastjet webpage was 5kg per person) in separate locked container.
We had a heated discussion with the captain and demanded to know why he is setting his own set of rules not aligned with company policy. This went back-and-fort as we pegged him not to destroy our dream of hunting buffalo as it would be impossible to get ammo this short notice for 404 and 458. Finally (reasons unknown to me) the Captain said that load the crap on-board and lets go. Of course we were happy as hell, but that left us with constant worry of what would we face on our flight back to Johannesburg after the safari. More on that later.
Paperwork in Victoria Falls Airport went without problems and actually was pretty pleasant. All personnel working there were very nice and we had couple of good laughs. I really hope more tourist will be inbound after the COVID shit, as its struggle for local people when the whole tourist industry capacity is almost offline. Overall very good people in Zimbabwe, very helpful and nice - thank you for that!
THE CAMP:
- great camp team, lead by Dan
- good food, cleaning and laundry services worked well (and were really fast)
- electricity via generator (parts of the day). Will be upgraded 2022 to solar system, that will provide electricity 24/7
- hot & cold water always available
- on-suite in lodges
- working wifi
- pool
View from the camp's "fireplace"
THE HUNT:
Hunting wild buffalo in Zim has been the dream for our group for many many years. For this trip we decided to skip agents and book trip straight from Outfitter. After around year of doing due diligence and talking with many Outfitters we decided to go with Martin Pieters Safaris. It was a hard choice between Martin and Mokore Safaris, whom I want to mention here also as Gary from Mokore demonstrated also great customer service and I’m very thankful of that.
The moment I met Martin outside of Victoria Falls airport, I just knew we made a good choice and this would be epic! That first intuition proofed to be right as the trip was one for history books. We are so grateful for Martin and Ross (+whole team), for building us experience we will never ever forget.
Before we got moving from the airport to the camp, the intros were made. Martin and Ross asked us that have we been hunting in Africa before. One of our guys, (joker from God’s mercy) said that he’s killed over 500 buffalos before this trip. That remark was met with a long silence before he added “with Playstation”. After that he was dubbed as a Mr.Playstation for the rest of the trip (followed comments in the heat of hunting “come come, this is not a fucking video game” ). All good and fun!
First morning we started with checking the guns. Again it was demonstrated why this step is so crucial as one of the guns was shooting as bad as blind Joe. Action was separated from the stock to get it in to the gun case. When it was put back together in Zim it was totally off. With good organization skills and experience, the PH’s set the scene so that problem was mitigated and the gun carried on to put one buffalo down during the trip. With that the hunting started!
A LOT of buffalo was seen, inc. these young ones
During the 6 hunting days, we coved a lot of kilometers. The amount of buffalos in Matetsi 5 was incomprehensible, as there literally were thousand to be seen every day. I personally could not believe how much there actually were, as I have thought they are much more scarce. Martin had given us heads up of the amount of game, but still it caught me by surprise. Biggest hoards probably had some 1000-2000 heads. We even saw a Dagga Boy group that were 29 strong (all shooters…..). They really seems to like the Matetsi 5 with all the water and food. Martin also takes good care of area and the animal population, and one can really see it.
Hunting was done sport and stalk. First and second day, we covered a lot of klicks with foot and by trusted Toyota’s, but could not locate right bull or just on the final moment wind shifted and we only saw dust after that. PH’s ran a very strict quality specs for bulls to hunt ethically and to support population strength. All bulls hunted needed to be mature, past-breeding age with solid, hard bosses. The older the better. And all three were just that.
Lion kill and sanitation crew
On our trip, third day was truly a super day for our group. All hunters had their buffalos during that day. One in the morning and two in the late afternoon. Mine was even better, as I got a nice kudu in the morning and buffalo in afternoon – could not ask much better!
We spotted kudu resting under tree around 08 in the morning with couple of smaller bulls. We left the car and started our stalk. It was already +35 Celsius at that point and hot as hell. The distance was around 700m and we had a good wind. Before we could close the distance, the bulls took off (nobody knows why, ghosts) and with that, we were hot on their tails. We tracked them maybe 2km and got up to them just when they were going over the hill. At that time, the group was joined around 10 bulls. I was on the sticks, but we just couldn’t line up ~150m shot before they went over.
Off the sticks and again running after them. Our trackers then did great job to circulate and to put us ahead of them. We then stayed put and waited before they appeared on opposite hill around 100m distance. Before shot, we needed to do a fast readjustment on our location to get clear shot through some bush. Martin located good bull and I did a rush job… shot was low but the bull marked it. I saw the bull run over the hill and thought fuck, this will be a tricky one. I absolutely hate when bad shots happen, makes me feel sick to my stomach for the animal. Lucky that we had a great team of trackers with us. They were hot on its tail right away after the shot and we located the bull momentarily in a slope. High knee, one shot and we thanked the kudu for everything.
After lunch and rest, we continued chasing the buffalo. When we were driving back to camp with kudu, we saw a group of six dagga boys in distance. Martin and trackers figured that in the late afternoon they would still be laying down and we could sneak very close to them to look for shot opportunity when they started to move again. That plan worked like a charm! We left the car around 500m from the general area where bulls were last seen and continued by foot. Pretty soon we located the group and started to close the distance. To be super careful, last 50m needed to done crawling.
We got to about 30m from the group. They were laying down just other side of small hill. At the same time we sat down, thunder started to close in. Good dammit, if the thunder fucks this up! In the group, there was estimated 43” bull that we REALLY wanted to get. I was sure the thunder will mess that opportunity, but in the end, thunder was just a lot of noise but no real problems. Around 3:30pm the group stood up and started to feed downhill. At that time we just couldn’t get a shoot as the big bull was all the time in bad angle or covered with other bulls. No worries, we figured - they are moving down to the valley and we could easily intercept them as wind was good.
Watching the group of Dagga boys
Of we go! We navigated the bush and started to approach the bulls again. But surprise surprise, the bulls were nowhere to be seen on the place we were sure they were headed! What the hell? Again trackers did magic and in the end we figured that there were a group of buffalos below the hill and the dagga boys joined them. With no time after that Sherlock Holmes work we located the big group and started to fallow them. It was an interesting two hours with the group. We were under 100m from the group multiple times (closest 15m) and I was on the sticks twice, but both times there weren’t a shooter in sight. We knew there were shooters in the group as it was around 200 heads strong and the dagga boys had joined them earlier.
River "valley" where we met the buffalos
Finally the group headed to dry river valley with us in their tails. We crossed the dry rivel to opposite bank and started to work to be ahead of the moving group. When moving, our tracker noticed some buffalos on the opposite bank lying under a tree. Distance at that time was around 200m so we knew that we need to get closer to confirm it’s a good bull. Crawling again. We did around 100m in hands and knees, all the way to the bank of dried river. Martin set up the sticks and up the Blaser R8 went. While Martin and trackers were estimating the bulls on the opposite bank we noticed the main group working their way on the dry rivel and first buffalos started to walk past of us in just 20-30m distance. Finally Martin decided that the bull laying under the tree in opposite bank wasn’t good enough. We shifted our attention group moving on the dried river. Then almost as a lighting from the sky, Martin excitedly said to me: that beast, shoot it and shoot it now! I located the bull easily due to its size and send 300gr Barnes bullet on its way! BOOM, we heard the hit while rest of the heard started running. First 2 second I though the bull started to run with the group, but very fast those thoughts were forgotten as we heard a loud “below” and new the game was over! We started to approach the buffalo with million emotions. The bull only went 10m due to heart shoot. It crashed on river rocks and rested there, with multiple chips from horns around it. I was so happy, one dream done – first Cape Buffalo. Could not be done without Martin and his teams great efforts!
Old bull, thank you
Rest of the team also shoot buffalos that same day, so one could imagine the mood in campfire that evening was cheerful one J We continued to hunt other species after that and ended safari one day early to visit Victoria Falls (highly recommended, great destination)!.
Triplets
TRAVELLING FROM VICTORIA FALLS:
We went to Victoria Falls one day early, as we really wanted to see the Falls. Our group stayed in Sheerwater Explorers Village, near the Falls. It was a really nice hotel and very new. All worked like a charm and it was easy e.g. to arrange PCR testing visit us at the hotel.
We also visited Martin’s restaurant called Three Monkeys in Victoria Falls. Nice and exotic setting, based on old train cart. Cocktails were good and food even better. Especially Kudu carpaccio was really good!
After nice couple of days, all went to hell due Fastjet. We were waiting to leave to airport in two hour’s time, when hotel management came running to get us. Never a good sign. The informed us that Fastjet had cancelled the flight due to “low amount of customers”. It's is quite funny, that they couldn’t notify us e.g. previous day so we could have joined that flight. Nothing. News came only around four hours before flight. The offered to reroute us to Harare with “hope” they could get us to flight to Johannesburg at same evening. Also they remember to mention first thing, that they won’t take any responsibility to cover any of our costs due to the cancellation.
At that time we opted to stay one more night in Victoria Falls as they said, there will be “most likely” flight tomorrow to Johannesburg. For the whole night we kept our fingers crossed that the flight would happen. In the end, we were so relieved when the flight really left from Victoria Falls. I was really disappointed with the Fastjet all the way and will contact them later on to discuss this matter. Its sad as they could really have competitive advantages carrying hunters and their guns, if they just would run a proper show. There isn’t that many options to travel with guns from SA to Zim during the Covid times.
FINAL REMARKS,
Was our group happy for the experience? Hell yes! I would highly recommend Martin Pieters Safaris to anybody who’s looking great safari conducted (anywhere) in Zimbabwe. I couldn’t image the amount of buffalos we saw during the week and the superb professionalism Martin and his team demonstrated. We will be back in near future to continue chasing buffalos!
Cheers for a great trip! And thank you all for the info shared on AfricaHunting, helped me tremendously to plan this trip!!
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