This morning started off bright and early again, wake-up
knock was at 5:30. Had a quick hot
chocolate for breakfast at 5:45 and we hit the trails at 6:00am. We decided to check up on the Leopard, but on
the way, there found a female lion on the road, soaking up the rising sun. She was listening to something off in the
distance, and still looked half-asleep, so we shot photos of her at first with
backlight, before moving around to get some photos from the front.
Then we continued the search for the Leopard, but on the
way, ran across a bunch of Elephants drinking down at the river. We stopped to photograph them, and after a
few minutes, I realized there was a baby under her mama, nursing. She came out
and played in the water a little, slapping at it with her trunk, like she
wasn’t too sure what to do. Then she
went back to nursing for a bit. When she
was done, she took a break for it along the riverbank. I think I might have gotten some good video
of that. She seemed to want to go say
hello to a large elephant that was up on the top of the riverbanks, but before
she could get all the way up the hill, mama and the aunts went after her and
rounded her up and brought her back to the river. LOL
A second group of elephants then came down to the river,
with a few older babies. and the first group slowly made its way back up the
hill and wandered off. We watched the
second group for a bit before leaving again to look for the Leopard.
Once again, we got side-tracked when we ran across a large
male lion making all kind of noise and we stopped to photograph him. He made
his way back across the river, so we did the same, getting ahead of him and waiting
for him to come to us. I got some videos
of him calling out a few times, and some good photos of that as well. He slowly made his way over to a tree and
laid down, eventually taking a nap which is when we left him.
Our driver accidentally got the jeep stuck on a stream
crossing and we were jammed in there pretty good. While waiting for another jeep to come pull
us out, we stretched out legs. Our other
jeep showed up, and two of us jumped on with them as they had just seen a group
of Warthogs, which I hadn’t photographed yet, so they took us to them. We were supposed to head back after that, but
since our jeep was still stuck…. That driver decided to take us with them, and
we went looking for the leopard again.
We ran across a tree with a bunch of white monkeys in it…
and stopped to photograph that. After a
short stop there, we got word that the jeep was out the ditch and moving again
so we were headed to meet up with them, when we ran across the leopard!
We tracked it as it moved through the trees and then it went
down to the riverbank … we headed down there, photographing it as we went. Once it went back up the hill, the two of us
ran over to our jeep and rejoined our group and off we went to photograph the
leopard some more. It was a great
morning.
After our mid-day break, we had Tea and then went to the
hide in place of the evening drive. We
knew that it had been very rainy recently and that there were plenty of sources
of water around, so the odds of anything showing up were slim. Nothing did show up, but we all had a great
time in the hide joking around and making the poor guy that worked there laugh
harder than he had on the job before, according to him. It was fun, but we all decided to skip the
hide tomorrow and do another game drive instead.
We came back to camp, had another wonderful dinner and now it’s time to call it a night. Wake-up call is 5:30 again tomorrow morning.
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