Gem and Stu’s World Tour

Day two in the Serengeti started (after swapping stories of hearing lion in the night - some other group got a little over-excited and claimed that the lion were walking in between our tents!!!) with an early morning game drive - we left about 6.30 so any notion of this being a relaxing holiday soon got abandoned.

It wasn’t looking like being a terribly successful morning - we saw a herd of elephant in the distance, a water buck and some interesting birds (as well as the ever present impala and a few buffalo).

And then we got stuck in the mud…. It had been raining pretty hard the previous evening and the mud roads were fairly treacherous. This was quite amusing at first until we realised quite how remote we were (admittedly the driver did have radio but I think he was too proud to call for help until absolutely necessary) when we got out of the truck. We asked Beerman if we could do anything to help and he suggested we look for some stones to place under the wheels for traction… “but don’t go too far!”

Luckily somebody saw us and came to our rescue:

On our way back to the campsite for lunch things definitely picked up :o) First of all we cam across a whole family group of giraffe right next to the road - some even doing their funny bendy leg thing when they are eating off the ground.

(We have loads more phots of these giraffe on flickr)

And then we caught sight of a leopard (by which I mean that I saw the tail and arse of a cat through my binoculars that I was told was a leopard).

However, after lunch and some more hippo:

was possibly the highlight of our tour so far; going back through the main plains of the serengeti we spotted a cheetah in the distance. There were three about two hundred metres to our left and we watched them walking for about 10 minutes. Then, when we thought they were just going to wander off, they suddenly changed direction and headed towards the road. It turns out that they had spotted an Impala standing on a termite mound 300 metres to the right of our road. We watched them, a mother and two young, cross the road right in front of us and then slowly approach and stalk the impala right up until the final chase. The kill happened just over the brow of the hill so we did not see that (and neither impala or cheetah were seen again so we new they had made the kill) but that didn’t stop it being an amazing site!!!

We also saw a lioness sitting on a rock, but by that point it didn’t seem so exciting.

That night we camped on the crater rim, which was alot colder than we had been used to. Also the campsite (another bush camp) was also occupied by an old (and grumpy) buffalo who grazed the site during the night and chased anybody who dared to go to the loo. I might also add at this point that, in our haste to pack for the safari (and having not camped in africa yet or been advised otherwise) we had not packed a torch - we had bought some lovely head-torches too, so were stumbling around in the dark, much to Gemma’s annoyance. Grrrr!