Day 12: Serengeti

Up early for the morning game drive. Today we added a leopard in a tree, eight female lions and a lone majestic male, little dikdiks, a huge herd of cape buffalo and many more of the animals we have already seen. Our guide and driver, Mbisi, has been doing this for 20 years and is wonderful. He has a great sense of humor, especially with six women who need to stop and use the bush in lion country. Must be a funny picture for the animals as we moon them! As we pass other safari trucks, we stop and ask if they have seen anything interesting. This morning we missed seeing the three cheetahs bring down a young zebra. Before they could eat it (cheetahs are fast but shy), they were chased off by the hyenas and vultures who ripped into it and tore it apart. We got there in time to see the hyenas covered in blood carrying legs around, etc. Not sad at all that I missed the first part, they were disgusting enough!

The afternoon game drive brought us face to face with a male lion, great pictures. We also spent 30 minutes watching a herd of elephants playing in a watering hole. We finished off the drive watching six lions make a feast of a zebra. Grisly but interesting.

After dinner, we decided to go out to the pool and look at the stars we don't generally see on our side of the world. I stretched out on a big flat rock by the pool staring upwards. Within 10 minutes there were three employees rushing out there calling me off the rock. Seems there is a resident python and leopard that like to come frequent the pool at night. You all know that I won't even go inside the snake house at the zoo, so I'm sufficiently freaked out that I stood a two percent chance of being squeezed to death. I'm reading a book to avoid dreaming about it.