Animal kingdom

May 6, 2009

Like yesterday, we woke up at 5:30 this morning and headed off into the bush. A new French couple on their honeymoon have joined us at Chitwa Chitwa, so we had a full jeep.

We were lucky to see a group of giraffe and zebra, all enjoying their morning meal and grazing peacefully before we tracked down the pride of lions we followed yesterday. They were done with their 30-hour feast and were lazily walking about.

The entire group of them – three grown females and about nine cubs – would walk a bit, stop, lie down, play with each other, then continue. Suddenly, one of the adults started off with a purpose and the rest followed in the tall grass. We looked over to where she was heading and we saw a few impala: dessert after the zebra meal!

We stayed silent and watched the lions stalk the unsuspecting impala, but the prey realized something was amiss when one of the lions refused to stalk in the camouflage of the grass. Once the impala spotted the lazy lion, they started snorting, warning their friends that predators were near. It was just like watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, but unfortunately, we didn’t have the serious narration or the bloody kill. So we went on to find other animals to watch.

At the insistence of one of our South African friends, we continued last night’s hunt for a rhino, only this morning we were successful! We saw a large male rhino, slowly walking along, marking its territory with sprays of urine as it went. It actually moved quite quickly and once it was out of sight, we were on the hunt for a pachyderm.

It wasn’t long before we came upon a relatively young male elephant who was terrified of the jeep-bound tourists who were following it. It kept trying to hide from us (unsuccessfully), and after we got a few good pictures, we were on our way.

We saw a few wildebeest, more zebra and a warthog during our journey, then returned to the lodge for another tres yummy breakfast.