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After viewing this first pride for awhile, we moved on to a group of giraffes. The camera shutters were snapping rapid fire. It would take too much space to describe our encounter with many of the smaller animals. While driving along one of us would spot something and we would stop for a time to view and discuss. (By the way, I should mention that the four of us have our own Toyota Land Cruiser and Nickson is a great guide/driver) He gives us the royal treatment.
Just after stopping for a picnic lunch, we saw another leopard but a little farther off the road. Beautiful! A little later we made a third sighting of a leopard (once again draped over a tree branch) and this one was very close to us. Hopefully some good pics. A little later we ran into an old male lion resting near some rocks. He was injured and had old scars all over his body and face. Nickson said that the pride would bring him food if he was unable to walk.
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We awoke this morning to a great sunrise coming over the Serengeti plains which are layed out in front of us as we stand on the balcony outside our room. Over night we had heard various animal noises. The Serengeti Lodge is settled into a hillside in the middle of the Serengeti National Park. The hotel is powered by 3 separate generators (but no internet!).
Breakfast was very good. Jaimie and Jackie had crepes, Mario had an omelette, and I opted for cereal and toast, as I was ready for a simpler fare. All was excellent. We met Nickson for our 8 AM departure and headed out to travel over as much of the Serengeti Park as possible and hopefully see as many animals as possible. This was planned as a full day game drive and boy did we see game!
We started off with a pride of lions nestled in amongst some trees just off the road. The Serengeti is criss-crossed with many, many miles of dirt roads. These roads are narrow and sometimes partially or completely covered with water since the rainy season has now begun. (But no rain today!)
So, to mention all of the smaller encounters, we saw secretary birds, hartebeest, ostrich, hyena, grand and not-so-grand gazelles, many hippos both in and out of the water (one hippo was 3 times larger than the rest!), waterbucks (whose hair is so long and its oil so smelly that it chokes the lion, making it a last choice for food), black headed heron, a crocodile, lilac breasted roller (bird), a grouping of old water buffalo bulls (so old that they have been kicked out of their herds - these old bulls get together in an old bulls retirement club), marabu stork, griffen vultures, white backed vulture, gray heron, dikdik (smallest antelope that mate for life and once one dies the other dies shortly after), lappet faced vulture, many zebras, and many wildebeest. There are 28 hoofed animals in Serengeti and we saw most of them.
The highlights of the day were cats, cats, cats! We found a leopard napping in a tree limb in the middle of the morning. Nickson said this leopard sighting was the best he has ever seen. (He has been doing these safaris for 9 years) By the way, there are no private vehicles in the park, only the many safari touring vehicles run by several different companies. The drivers communicate by radio to help each other home in on the locations of major animal sightings. Anyway, we spent a lot of time snapping and watching this first leopard. It was "flopped" over a branch similar to the way Cal (J&M's cat) flops on the arm of a chair. We can definitely see similarities. A leopard likes to spend a lot of time in trees and after a kill it will carry it's kill back up into the tree. If the kill is too heavy, the leopard will remove the guts to "lighten" the load.
After leaving the leopard, we ran into a safari vehicle that was stuck in the mud (it was very, very muddy in some places today). Since the vehicle was from our same company (Ranger Safaris), Nickson stopped and pulled them out of the mud using a tow chain. While this was going on, we saw a big "bus-type" safari vehicle get stuck too. All of the passengers (15 or so) got out in the mud and pushed the bus out! We were glad our vehicle was powerful enough not to get stuck, as we didn't feel like getting into the mud.
Our last stop of significance was the best of the day. Right near the road, a cheetah was resting on a mound of dirt. The cheetah is like a leopard except for several differences that are all geared toward speed. The cheetah has longer legs, larger lungs and claws that do not retract. The cheetah can run at 112 kilometers per hour for short bursts, and because of this the cheetah has no predators on the Serengeti plains. One other difference between the cheetah and the leopard are the type of spots: the cheetah is "spotted" and the leopard is "rosetted".
We called it a day after the cheetah and arrived back at the lodge around 5:30 PM. Today is Jackie's birthday (don't tell anyone but it's the 55th!), so we celebrated by opening two bottles of South African wine (purchased and hand carried by J&M up to Tanzania). During dinner Jaimie & Mario had arranged for the serving crew to do a native dance out to our table. They surrounded Jackie and sung two local songs plus happy birthday. The dining room was full of fellow guests and for this ceremony, incredibly, they shut the lights off in the room so everyone was definitely stopped from eating and paid attention to Jackie's birthday. Earlier I had given her an elephant carving that I purchased in Arusha. All totaled, she said this was her best birthday ever!
These days are long and exhausting so by 10 PM we were sound asleep. (Night owls, hah?)