Expedition Serengeti Post 4 of 5

Last night was NUTS. All sort of animals were up and causing alarm around camp. Lions were calling out by the bathrooms, leopards from the east side of camp, and a hyena was literally five meters from my tent. They were cackling, laughing and whooping all over the paddock at around 4 am. So of course I got up to look, and I saw one of them. Big, big girl hyena. It was SO awesome.

Disappointing part of this was that I tried to record their calling, but the sound of the camera recording blocked the sound of the hyenas. Disappointing.. Funny part was that everyone thought I was the one making all the noises. I'm honored that I'm authentic, but come on people. 4 in the morning? I'm not that crazy.

This morning was another interesting one. I got up after that crazy early start and went to get in the same car I was in yesterday, due to my superstitious nature. After eating breakfast, I went to get in the car and it was Sipaya and Whitney again, so I was excited to have another great day of spotting. And then another car starts rolling toward ours. Luckily the driver, Ninah, got there in time to close one of the doors and stop it from rolling. Unfortunately, it did damage the passenger door enough so that it wouldn't close. Fun stuff, man. So, lucky us, we got Nuru the mechanic as a driver and askari Bura as a copilot. It was pretty sweet.

Now on to other news. We game drove all morning and got to see Double Trouble again(pictured above). This was my third time seeing them, this time they were just chillin out with Mom on a log. I loved being able to check up on the same individual animals, namely the big cats, because it made it more exciting to see the same surroundings. The next goal, see a leopard and pray for another cheetah sighting because a few select people hadn't seen either one yet(even in Nakuru). To noone's surprise, that didn't really happen, I even started to fall asleep. That is, until we got to the hippo pool. That was a really fun time. They were everywhere, and they stunk, plus there were crocodiles. Bura, true to form, was imitating "viboko", which means hippos in Swahili, and it was pretty darn funny. Ton of baby hippos play fighting, and big adults actually fighting. It was definitely an interesting sighting. Most of the people in our car started to get in so that we could drive to the lodge, where we could eat lunch and swim, when suddenly, we heard the word "duma". Well, then everybody (myself included) jumped out of the car with our cameras to go take this picture. Talk about an odd species association. There was an adult cheetah just hanging out by the hippo pool. It didn't stay long, but it did give some people their first cheetah sighting and me a few good pictures.

After a few hours of relaxation later, we started game driving until we had to go back to camp. This time, we HAD to find a leopard. And we did. It was of course awesome. We first noticed a car parked in front of us on the road. The elderly people in it swore they saw a leopard in the grass so we, of course, decided to look. Patrick was the first to see the tail, and then it flicked again. This was such a tease at first, I thought that was all we were going to see of that leopard. We scanned the grass again, for a good ten minutes, before I saw a flock of birds fly out from under a distant tree. I made a verbal note of it, but kept searching nearer to our car. Then my friend confirmed the sighting. There she was, sitting on a termite mound looking out into the distant grassland. We quietly creeped, as well as we could in a car, perpendicular to her and waited and watched. Cars started coming in, including some of our own, and the leopardess started waltzing toward the road. She crossed right in front of one of our cars, and walked to another termite mound on the other side. Suddenly, she stops and looks into the distance again. This time, she crouched suddenly and continued to stare. At first it looked like stalking, until she turned tail and fled back across the road and eventually across a river. A large troop of baboons were coming  toward us, and considering that male baboons are on record as leopard killers, I'm glad she managed to get away. However, it would fulfill the need to see a hunt/kill. Just sayin.

We drove home, passing a hippo lumbering out of the water and a few antelope, excited about another terrific day and stoked for the drive home (mainly so that I could shower).

TO BE CONTINUED...

SWOD is "kisu" which means "knife"