Public Holiday Season Part 2

After our lovely trip to the Midlands we had a few days to unpack and start the planning for our next weekend away to the safari lodge at Simbambili. Usually Terry and I make this trip on our own as not everyone is as flexible as we are when it comes to packing off to the bush for a few days but happily this time we had a full house with us. All of Terry's family plus all of us extras were out en masse to watch the animals and give the staff a hard time!

Mimi (Terry's mom) and I spent a marathon day in the shops gathering all of the food and necessities that the troop would be needing and then cooked and packed it all up into what became a very full Jeep. All of the hard work was well worth it and we all ate incredibly well on our stay.

As far as highlights from our sightings we saw plenty of amazing things, some big and some small. On this trip our ranger and tracker, Chris and Doctor, seemed to be able to find all of the cool creepy crawlies for us to inspect close at hand. We got to play with a Schleggels beaked blind snake and a very confused chamelion who wasn't quite sure how to turn from green to slightly pale white person but he really did give it his best shot. We were lucky enough to see 2 attempted hunts, one by lions and 1 by leopard but neither managed to grab dinner while we were watching. Our luck with lions was amazing this trip and we were priviliged enough to sit with a pride of lions who were helping their sister home by cullering (something close to the MGM lion roar but more grunty sounding). It is impossible to describe the feeling you get when you are sitting in the midst of animals who are making those sounds. I learned that we humans are biologically engineered to get scared when that sound is anywhere near(here is one of the old males we saw, not so pretty after 13 years of hard living in the bush)! We also saw 3 month old lion cubs for a few minutes. Seeing them play was incredibly adorable; I wish I could share a picture of them with you but we came across them at night and weren't able to get a picture of them.

Another first for us was to see a group of about 100 vultures helping themselves to what was left of a large male Kudu. As Terry's official favorite sighting of the trip we have plenty of photos, none of which really do the sighting justice. The crazy noises those birds make (especially in a group that large) sounded like something out of a B grade Hollywood movie! Clacks, hisses, screeching and all. Last of the top sightings was a few minutes with a huge male elephant, his head was at least 15 feet high and his tusks were probably about 5 feet long. And lucky for us we caught him in a good mood and he let us sit and watch as he ate and bossed some of the girls around...

The real excitement came when we were caught off guard during a drinks break by a lion and had to race back to the vehicle, thanks to Tina for capturing our escape on camera! No just kidding! but Tina did do a great job of photographing our traditional bush foot race on the airstrip and as usual Terry won but it was a good showing by everyone involved! And through all of that we only got stuck once! (More Simbambili Photos)