Our last full day on Safari. We survived the night. I was woken up about 6 or 7 times by the howls, the roars and the tent break-in attempts. Shona slept through the lot.
We had a breakfast in the main ‘mess’ tent and got underway. I asked Frank whether he could show us any Crocodiles (doubting myself immediately… do they have crocs in the Serengeti? Is that just further north? Is it Crocodiles, or is it Alligators? No, gators are Florida. Definitely crocs… but this far south?).
5 minutes later, and Frank spots some trucks pulled up near a small waterhole, where we’d seen hippos the day before. Not only had he found us a croc, but a croc who was half way through eating a gazelle! How did we know it was a gazelle? Check out the photos…
While we sat watching him trying to swallow the very spikey animal, he started a death-roll:
While we’d missed the hunt, it was clearly a pretty unsafe place to hang about.
We left the croc to its meal and headed out to see what else we could find, Shona spotted something in the undergrowth. Frank was very impressed, she’d spotted a bat-eared fox; normally nocturnal and rare to see:
We saw mongoose (mongeese?), warthog, crazy colourful little birds, and a hyena, basking at the side of the road.
Shona’s lion count was up to 26 by the end of day one in the Serengeti. Today, it would tip over 60, including watching a pair mating, repeatedly (they’d been at it for 3 days and were clearly exhausted).
We went looking for the elusive Cheetahs again. Frank got word that a small family had been spotted, and we headed over there; again we saw distant Cheetahs making their way through the undergrowth. We moved past them, stopping for some lunch under a tree (which had a bat-eagle on top).
After lunch, Frank turned the truck around and headed back towards a small clearing. He had guessed that the Cheetahs were heading that way. Sure enough, within a few minutes, we saw this…
This was the mother of two cubs. She walked straight past our vehicle, within a metre, and settled under a nearby bush. However, following her were two cubs. One settled down with her mother. The other did this:
The poor woman in the video was terrified!
The rest of the day was spent sighting more and more stunning images and events. We saw hundreds of hippos crammed into an extremely muddy waterhole:
And simultaneously, an actual giraffe fight!
A rare summer storm rolled in as we were heading back towards our camp that evening, turning the sky black but striking an amazing evening light across the plains:
It was a phenomenal few days. Dusty, filthy, bumpy and packed full of spectacular wildlife.
After another night in our camp (with more growls, howls and meows), we reluctantly left the Serengeti, heading back to Arusha, before our flight the following day to Zanzibar.
Travels with Sklaroffs 