Early morning game drive in Serengeti

We got up at just after 5am, but we’d already been awake for about an hour. We were woken by Kim’s voice as she went off for her hot-air balloon ride! We had a light breakfast of bread, butter, jam, and bananas. While we were eating in the kitchen, an enormous Maribou stork (one of the ‘ugly five’) flew over us and landed just outside. He strutted around for quite a while and happily posed for photos! 😂

Talking of photos, we were going to have to be a bit selective about what we took today as we hadn’t been able to charge the camera or my phone properly.

We boarded our 4x4s for our morning game drive. We could hear baboons barking as we drove out of camp. We saw several balloons above us. Mankinga wasn’t impressed. He said the animals are always scared by the sound of the jets.

During the morning, we had an amazing time and saw:

• A white-bellied bustard
• Buffalos
• Zebras
• 3 hyenas
• A family of warthogs
• Giraffes
• Lots of guinea fowl
• Some hyrax sitting on top of rocks (these were too far away to photograph as we were trying to make our camera battery last). We saw them at Spitzkoppe Camp in Namibia.
• A solitary eland, the biggest antelope in Africa, weighing up to 800kg! We saw some at the Cape in South Africa, but they were quite far away, so we took the opportunity to snap this one close up!
• A leopard walking away from a tree and another stalking a gazelle. Both of these were fascinating to watch, but too far away to photograph properly.

While we were seeing all this wildlife, we were driving through vast open grassy plains with isolated mature trees and odd rock formations.Read more