Mangajan
Elephant outside our tent
Elephants on Safari
Elephants on Safari
Klaserie
Shobele
Klaserie
Adolescent male
Shobele
Klaserie
Adolescent male
We where woken at 5am, had a coffee and left for our game drive at 5.30am. We saw a male lion (Shobele), they are often on their own marking territory whilst the female and young lions hunt. His son was with him also, they tell us the lion is old an will die soon as 3 young males are banding together to fight him for his pride – sometime soon, due to his age and injuries he will loose. We saw a heard of buffalo (old males). We saw a breeding heard of elephants and some hippopotamus (they stay in the water all day and only come on land at night time, to feed. Everywhere you go, you see Waterbuk and Impala. During the drive at about 7.30am we stopped for coffee and a snack. We returned back to camp at 9am and had breakfast at 9.30 am. After breakfast we went on a busy walk, right out of camp we came facet to face with a huge male elephant and we had to walk in the other direction (no on foot animal encounters are safe). So off we headed and looked at cheetah, hyena, baboon, hippo and elephant tracks. We had a dung spitting contest – that is right we put kudu dung in our mouth and saw who could spit it the furthest. Josh and I had a nap for an hour and woke up in our tent to see that 2 rather large elephants where right outside the window. They where less than 1 meter from us with only a canvas wall in between – there is on other word except - amazing! We had lunch at 2.30pm then went on our next game drive at 4pm. On this drive we saw the father cheetah (Mangajan), he was sleeping and behind him was a heard of giraffe and zebra walking. We saw Warthogs, Stenbok and hippopotamus on land. We also saw another lone males lion (Klaserie), he was walking on the male lions territory that we saw yesterday. You can tell he is old because his bottom teeth are worn done. We looked for the female heard but they where on another reserve that we couldn’t’ go to. Again we returned to our room and where collected for dinner, tonight we had Kudu pie, chicken, pumpkin fritters and cauliflower for mains, chicken breast wrapped in bacon, for starters and pavlova for dessert. We had some drinks at the bar and went to bed at 11.30pm. Before dinner when we where having a drink at the bar, a scorpion ran past Josh’s toes! If he had been in the path of the scorpion we would be at the hospital now, as it was very poisonous, Josh would have 45 minutes to get to the doctor before he died, and if someone happens to be allergic (you don’t’ find this out until you are bitten) you have only 10 minutes! I think the insects are the most dangerous things here!
