Feb 17-07: Safari Day 3

Our game drive last night was fairly quiet again, although we did see a herd of water buffalo …VERY closely I might add, and they are HUGE, REALLY HUGE. The have heads like armour plating, and when they stare at you, its very disconcerting, like they are looking right through you. The angle of the shots goes directly into the sun, so the photos are not that great. They set up evening drinks and nibblies by the hippo water hole, where we watched the sun set and had a very civilized drink together. A rest stop is part of every outing, with either drinks, or coffee and muffins in the morning. Dinner was again another excellent spread last night, seems to be non-stop eating around here! We all crashed early, as 5am comes VERY early.

The weather this morning was clouded over, but much cooler (thank god), they said it was well over 35 celcius yesterday…and with no breeze, it seemed like you could melt within moments. We all laid low yesterday afternoon. Our game drive this morning was really productive – we were joking with Solly that we’d like to order a cheetah and rhino, since those were the only two that we had not yet seen. As fate would have it, not long after the other team had spotted both, so we raced over to where they were (sort of like a roller coaster in a jeep down these dirt roads!), and there was both a cheetah and rhino in the same field! We spent some time with the cheetah first, Solly tells us that its rare to see them, maybe only once a month they see one. Then we had to do a little tracking to find the rhinos again, but Solly is very good at what he does. We picked up their trail in a large field, three white rhino males. I have some awesome photos of them, again, we got so close! And our luck was on a roll today, in the same field behind them was a large family of elephants, 4 adults, two babies (Solly says the babies were under a year old). So, we again spent some time with them, and so very close, the pictures I got, well, I am amazed at our good luck so far. Its going to be very hard to edit those down…

And our safari trip tonight we saw another group of lions, we caught them in the late afternoon when they were totally flaked out. They tell us that lions are very lazy during the day and all they do is sleep. As you can see from the photos, we were no more than 20-30 feet and they slept pretty much the whole time, didn’t worry at all about us! Then they did do a little moving around, and I since they were so close, again, I was blessed with a few stunning photo opportunities. We’ve been SO VERY lucky with animal sightings on this trip so far…