Africa Trip Report - Part 5

May 14th
During the night, we heard those two lions grunting and roaring off in the distance. One of our group had hoped to hear lions roaring, but he slept right through all that noise.

We woke in the morning to a layer of fog over the spillway in front of us. It was quite serene as the sun rose. We got a late start on the safari drive due to a dead battery. Richard robbed a battery off one of the support vehicles at camp and a short while later, we were off on our morning drive.

It didn't seem like we saw much on this drive, some impala, kudu, tsessebe, steebok, and ostrich. Plus a whole lot of birds from vultures, to a steppe eagle, to a african fish eagle to storks and even a brown snake eagle.

On the way back to camp, the elephants appeared... everywhere. A group drinking by the spillway, a breeding herd with what looked like 4 babies walking down to and across the spillway, and another breeding herd near our camp. We only had seen a few elephants up to this point, but this day pretty much opened the floodgates for elephant sightings the rest of the trip.

After a nice long siesta of naps and card games, our afternoon activity was a canoe trip down the spillway. Depsite having to paddle ourselves, this was a enjoyable outing. We didn't see much wildlife during the trip except for a lone elephant which peaked out of the trees at us. We passed the Discovery camp and admired their much larger tents before finding a nice sundowner spot along the bank of the spillway.

When we got back to camp, there was no staff. They were mysteriously gone. Richard indicated that we were gonna head over to the Discovery Camp for dinner so we get in the truck and drove a very short distance to a nearby watering hole where we discover the staff has set up a large fire with a BBQ dinner for us. How cool! Chicken, beef, pork, and sausage along with some great side dishes and we were wonderfully full. After dinner we headed back to our tents. Richard liked to keep us guessing about the "surprises" the entire trip.

May 15th
I had discovered Gin & tonics last night at dinner and was a wee bit tipsy on heading to bed. So it didn't help any when shortly after retiring to our tent, those lions started their grunting and roaring. At first they seemed pretty far away... kinda where they were the previous night. However, the next series of roars about 15 minuted later seemed to come from our camp. Man, they sounded like they were one tent over and we could hear movement near our tent. Eeek! And they continued to roar and grunt all night long, eventually moving away. But I was pretty much frozen in my cot. The Botswana common house spider... scary. Those lions roaring near our tent... petrifying. Again, I don't think being a bit intoxicated helped matters.

Today was the looonnnnnggggg drive to Savute. We got up very early and headed out. We didn't really expect to see much since this was really an all day transfer, but we were so wrong. Almost immediately, we spotted a herd of buffalo, the 3rd of the Big 5 for us. Some more kudu soon followed along with steenbok and impala. We also finally got our closeup of the ever present Lilac-Breasted Roller.

Then we heard Richard say "leopard". Eeee! There in the middle of the road in front of us was a 2 year old female leopard. Just sitting in the road. She moved off the road and we followed for a short while, but she was very shy and quickly disappeared into the brush. This would be our only leopard sighting for the trip, but we were all so excited just to see one.

As we approached the Selinda/Zib/Duma Tau area, animals started appearing everywhere. Tons of elephants, red lechwe, warthogs, and our first hippos. I see why this area is popular.

As for the elephants, they were really amazing to watch. First, almost every single breeding heard we saw had at least one if not more babies. We saw some that were 2-4 weeks old (very cute) and it was amazing how protective the heard was with the babies, often encircling them when we approached. And the ear flapping and trumpting when they were upset... what a great sound (as long as your not too close)!

We stopped for lunch at the Duma Tau hide overlooking the Zib lagoon. That is a nice spot. Great bird watching and we had elephants nearby and hippos slowly making their way towards us. The best sight... two baboons picking through elephant dung looking for seeds and other yummies. Apparently elephants don't "process" their food very well, so their poop is large and can contain seeds and nuts that weren't digested. Awesome and gross!

We continued on towards Savute and Chobe NP. I am not sure how we went into the park, but the road.... it was horrid. Deep and very sandy. So bad in fact that we diverted off the side to an "alternate road" that was more bushes and trees than road. We were all pretty much in the center of the truck by the end due to all the whiplashing branches. There is really no way to describe all this. We took some videos and I am working on getting those posted soon.

Upon reaching Chobe/Savute, we were filthy and extremely dusty so the first order of business was to hit the showers. Our camp site at Chobe was a bit small like at Nxai Pan, but both those sites are National Park sites. The site was also very sandy... so sandy that we sunk down about 5 inches when sat in our chairs around the bush tv.

More photos can be found at my smugmug site.