A Short Night and a Boat Ride

Our night ended at 4.20AM when we were woken up by animal noises nearby: deep, guttural growles, heavy breathing, barking, and fighting noises.
We lay awake while researching what it could be.

Possibly a leopard or a hyena attacking a dog close by 🫣 This meant it was safest to stay in the tent until sunrise... too bad Laura really had to pee. The next two hours felt like a lifetime. In addition, we also heard several hippos on the other side of the camp ground's fence. One more reason to stay put.
We finally got up at 6.30 for a boat tour at Sunrise, but we were super tired due to the little sleep we got.

The boat landing point was at the gate to the old, now-submerged campground. As we were told, the water levels of the lake have been rising substantially over the past decade or so for reasons yet unknown.

On our tour, we saw lots of birds near the shore, including Kingfishers and Hamerkops, as well as lots of partially submerged ruins. The fishermen here use traditional balsa boats, which are tiny and super light weight. But whether they actually still use them or just bring them out for tourists nowadays is not so clear.
Yet we picked up some fish from them to feed to eagles, and later also spotted a hippo and some crocodiles.

Afterwards, we had an expansive breakfast and lounged around the campsite until the afternoon to skip the worst of the heat.
We only had 10 km to our next stop anyways: an (almost) wild camping site on the cliff overlooking the lake.

The views were stunning and after the camp host organised us a "guard" for the night to keep us safe from wildlife (our guard was a youngster of maybe 15 years and could probably do very little to defend us against any animals as he had nothing but his bare hands to do so 😆) we set up camp, had instant noodles for dinner and called it a night.Read more