It just keeps getting better!

Monday 1^st August

Apologies for lack of captions and any mistakes - wifi is too iffy to fuss too much.

It’s been an amazing few days and you wonder if it can get any better. We are certainly getting our fill of fantastic animal sightings.

Thursday we did a morning game drive followed by a visit to the Painted Dog Conservation centre. Not a lot to be seen on the game drive and only 2 dogs to see at the conservation centre, who were both long term residents and not likely to be released back to the wild, so a little disappointing. They did have a great display and story to tell at the centre so it was an enjoyable visit. Sadly these dogs (also known as African Hunting Dogs) are an endangered species as they often get caught in snares set for antelope and don’t survive. As they are an animal that cares for the whole pack, often the whole pack is snared when they come to the aide of the first dog.

Back at camp for lunch and a rest in the afternoon. Just after lunch and before we fell asleep a herd of zebra came to the waterhole and also a couple of deer and warthog. We had a short nap and woke to find a herd of about 40 elephants outside our window. They were less than 30 metres away and we were able to watch them until dinner time and get quite a few photos, including the elephants drinking from the swimming pool.

The following day it was pack and move on to the town of Nata for the night. It was a long drive with a picnic lunch stop and only a few animal sightings along the way. After dropping our gear at Nata Lodge (permanent tents) we took a drive out to Magkadigkadi salt pans to see if there were any birds and to watch the sunset. Depending on the time of the year there are flamingos at the waterhole, but none at the moment as the water is too high. The sunset was just beautiful.  The sunsets and sunrises here in Africa have been spectacular. The sun is just a huge red ball. The sky doesn’t seem to colour up the way it does at home but rather just gets a pink hue across the whole sky (elephant trumpeting as I type). It got very cold once the sun went down, and that was our coldest night we have had so far.

A zebra crossing

Moving day again on Saturday and this time to another tent camp near Moremi game reserve and Chobe National Park. There is no power at this camp apart from limited solar and we were all wondering how we would cope charging phones and camera batteries. It seems to have worked OK so far. This camp is a seasonal camp and will get pulled down at the end of the year and will set up somewhere else for next season. We have cold running water and flushing toilets in the tents but have to order the hot water for showers in the afternoons. It is such a peaceful place and I am sitting out the front of the tent as I write this, on the raised bank of a channel of the river where we look down to a small island and where we have seen buffalo and lots of elephants. It is really special to go to sleep and wake up to the sounds of frogs croaking, hippos snorting, elephants trumpeting and lions roaring.

Yesterday, Sunday, we did a game drive in the morning where the highlight of the drive was a leopard hunting, and a pod of hippos playing in the water. We followed the leopard for a while and he didn’t seem too concerned about the vehicles following – he was intent on dinner. We didn’t actually see a kill as we lost him in the bush and there were so many vehicles around we decided to leave and let him get dinner. We had seen a couple of hippos before yesterday but they were all just huge grey rocks in the water and not doing anything. This was a large pod and they were quite active popping up and down in the water and play fighting.

Back at camp we had an afternoon nap (in preparation for our afternoon game drive) and woke to a lot of rustling outside our tent. I peeked out the flap and there was an elephant walking along the path in front of our tent (2 metres away) stripping the leaves from the trees as he passed. So close – scared to breathe or make a noise.

How close is that!

On our game drive yesterday afternoon we came across a huge herd of elephant. We estimated there were about 70 in the herd. The guide thinks that it was actually a few smaller herds that came together at the waterhole. We also saw a serval, an African wild cat and a large owl. We were all pretty tired by the time we headed back to camp.

Today was another amazing day. Up early for another game drive and today we were headed to Moremi Game reserve about 1hr30mins away. We didn’t get far from camp when we came across a pack of Painted Dogs out hunting for breakfast. We never thought we’d get to see these in the wild. There were 17 in the pack – 10 pups and 7 adults. We followed them for a while (headed back towards camp) hoping to see a kill but they moved out of range after about 40 minutes so we headed on towards the game reserve. We saw them take a couple of runs at impala and it was interesting to see them leave one or 2 of the adult dogs with the pups as baby sitters.

We all had high hopes for Moremi game reserve and weren’t disappointed. Not long after we arrived our guide spotted circling vultures so we followed them to see what was going on. As we approached the vultures we saw a young male lion, just standing there in the open, and also looking towards the vultures. We missed seeing the action of a cheetah killing an antelope. The cheetah had finished his meal and moved on but the lion moved in and claimed the leftovers and dragged the part eaten antelope into the bushes where he settled down to enjoy his stolen meal. Also spotted at Moremi were zebra, giraffe, hippos and impala. A pretty good day all round.