Kalahari Trails Day 3

Obviously we both slept like crap with our feet hanging out the end of the blanket on a mattress that’s thinner than our normal one. We got up at 6am and everything was damp.
I made coffee and we started making make shift washing lines to hang our things. Then Ellie cleaned the table at camp and put our mattresses on it.
At 7:15am Marellie came to pick us up to show us the latest meerkats that had been released and we set off down the trails in her Hilux. This was not the adrenaline rush we needed before breakfast because as the trail picked up the fence line the dunes started rolling and we were going up and down like a roller coaster.
Eventually we came to the meerkat release site but they were nowhere to be seen although we did see a spotted eagle owl with a chick. We waited 20 minutes and the meerkats didn’t appear so we got back on the back of the hilux for some more off roading.
Marellie had to check the water gauges from yesterday’s rainfall all over the property which is 3500 hectares. This is just a normal backyard in northern South Africa that you can’t do anything with except breed game. That 13.5 square miles in English.
Checking all of the dams and waterholes and rain gauges took nearly 3 hours but we found out yesterdays weather was seriously extreme as we had 38mm of rainfall. The average is 5-6mm.
We got back to camp at 10:15am, had a ghostie toastie for brunch and then wandered back over the sand dunes to check our camera trap for the Aardvark. Had we caught it? Yes, we had 5 photos and a good 30 second video from 8:30pm last night. He looked like he was bailing his burrow out. After that the camera went off twice but it was steamed up so we’ve left the camera hoping for better shots tonight. After that we took a drive out to Askem for some food shopping which took us a couple of hours.
When we got back we decided to drive some of the fence line to see if we could see the meerkats we saw yesterday while aardvark hunting but it was too hot and they were sleeping. Then we went back to camp and just chilled for an hour before heading upto the house to see if the meerkats would come up for dinner.
We got to the main house at 4pm and we’d literally just missed the meerkats coming for snacks so we wandered down the bottom of the road to see if they had gone home but the only one that was there was the baby sitter. The baby sitters are young females that have to prove themselves by being bullied and starved and looking after the colony and then one day they may become the matriarch of the colony.
Back at camp Ellie cooked for a change frying up some mince and adding a can of relish to it before mixing it with pasta. At the same time the clouds started brewing and anything that was outside I put away.
As soon as we had finished dinner we saw lightning and I grabbed the storm tarpaulin and we just about pulled it over the roof of the caravan. I had just finished staking it down when the real lightning started and the thunder cracked. I grabbed my camera and managed about 20 minutes of shooting it until the rain started and just as I put the camera in the car the heavens opened. It threw it down heavens hard and the wind got up and the caravan rocked from side to side. It was super scary but the tarp held and we stayed dry. As the storm started to die out we put the tv on, as we were in for the rest of the night.Baca lagi