May 23 - Evening Game Drive - Lions!

At 4:00 p.m., we headed out for another evening game drive, this time with Michael as our driver and tracker. Harry is fighting a bad case of tonsilitis.

A mischievous monkey was our first sighting. Then we saw impala. We saw fresh rhino poop, but Michael said that the rhinos were probably in the bush because of the breezy conditions. Rhinos have poor eyesight, so they have to depend on their hearing and their sense of smell. They retreat to the bush when the wind causes confusing sounds and smells.

And then, to our delight, we saw lions! Our count went up to four out of five on the Big Five sighting chart! We saw a couple of females, and then we saw a teenager lion lying on the ground with a very distended belly (he had just finished eating a kill), and then we saw a huge male. What a glorious sight! He nonchalantly sauntered down the road, and finally went off into the undergrowth.

Then we saw a hyena and a black backed fox. Hyena like to track and stalk leopards, so seeing them was a good sign that there might be leopards in the area. We vowed to look again tomorrow.Read more