Also more giraffes – aside from the cats, for which I have a particular affinity, I think the giraffes are my favorite. We were calling them dinosaurs – such crazy-looking things but very beautiful and so graceful when they move.
The morning’s excitement was that one of the rangers from another lodge had spotted the pride of lions – we first thought it was twelve, then we heard eighteen. D was so funny he turned around the vehicle with the explanation that “it’s really something to see a pride of twelve lions” and we were joking about how he felt the need to justify going to look for the lions. I was actually the one from our group to spot the pride – I was just looking out into the bush trying to see lions and all of a sudden I saw four faces looking back at me. The picture I uploaded is about as good of a shot of what I saw as I have – I think I zoomed in a little but that was very cool for me. I spent the whole safari looking for cats so I would usually miss the big things up ahead because I was so busy looking for smaller things by the side of the vehicle, but for once my cat-searching paid off!
So the pride walked literally just behind our vehicle, then we drove around a bit more and they walked in front of us. Once they had all passed we drove further on to another road they were likely to cross and cross they did – I got some pretty good pictures of adult females, a sub-adult male, and a little baby. The baby was so cute! After that we lost the lions but saw some baboons (whee…).
At lunch Rayshawn spotted an elephant just near camp (literally 15 meters off the path) so we went to check it out. D came with us and let us get within about 10 meters of it which was probably quite unsafe but it wasn’t THAT far to run for shelter (of course an elephant is pretty fast). When I first got there he had his ears out which means that he was pretty agitated but we stood still and he soon calmed down even when D went a little closer to see if he could get him to do something more interesting than what he was doing. But the elephant was too busy eating to bother charging at us, so we went and ate our lunches as well.
In the afternoon one of the other rangers had spotted a rhino, so we went to check that out. What an odd-looking thing! At one point it looked about to charge but it didn’t, which is most likely for the best although some of us thought it might be fun to be charged by at least one wild animal.
We also saw a family of hippos, one large hippo that moved faster in water than I’ve ever seen anything move, two warthogs, more zebras and water buffalo, the aforementioned 3,000-year-old-tree, and had a sundowner in a beautiful spot by a dry river bed. Following that, we saw the same male lion from the previous night – this time he got up, yawned, stretched, and moved locations so we got to see something a little more interesting than last night (although he did stretch and roll over last night which was very cute). This guy is just HUGE – the pictures really don’t do him justice but seeing this guy maybe 15 meters away is really spectacular.
We had a little group session when we got back, to present the professor with a gift for all of her amazing work on this trip, including acting as surrogate mother to eight students, and to reflect on the trip and bond a little bit. Dinner was again amazing, but I did not stay up too long afterwards because the internet was working again (it hadn’t been for over a day due to the heavy cloud cover). The moon and clouds were amazing that night – never seen a sky quite like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment