Day 11: Little Governors' Camp

September 12th...

In the morning we went out in search of a leopard and cheetah and couldn’t find either, so went down to the river crossing to see if we could get lucky there. At the river there were probably about 20 or 30 bloated wildebeest carcasses littering the river bank, and every now and again you would see one floating downstream. On the bank of the river, there were about 15,000 wildebeest trying to gather the courage to cross. Every now and again a wildebeest would come down to the river, get a drink and maybe even walk in a few feet, then they would see the floating carcasses and change their minds. Once one wildebeest goes, they all go and when one wildebeest would go down to the river, the others would follow suit, but as soon as the leader changed his mind, the rest would go up the bank as well. We sat there for about three hours and saw two small crossings from the other side of about a dozen or so wildebeest, but nothing spectacular, so we went back for lunch.

Elephants filmed from our tent at Little Governors' Camp

After lunch, I came out of my tent to charge the laptop and wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. I looked up noticed the guard had a pretty concerned look on his face. About 50 feet down the path just past the dinner tent was a huge bull elephant. I looked into the marsh in front of our tent and noticed another dozen or so elephants right in front of our tent. We were asked to go back into our tents and stay there and of course we obliged.

bat eared fox

Our afternoon game drive was a bit slow at first. We were looking for cheetah and leopard and struck out. On the way back though, we saw eland antelope. Elands are the largest of the African antelope and very shy. They don't hav a dainty frame like most antelope. Their frame is more like a large cow or bull, but taller. From there on the way back we stopped because Gaye noticed an aardwolf. They are nocturnal and very shy, so that was a nice sight even if it was pretty far away. When Solomon went to start the land rover up again, he looked down to see two bat eared foxes. Bat eared foxes and aardwolves are both nocturnal, so a sighting of them is pretty rare. On the way back we also noticed a termite mound with black backed jackals living in it and out of the mound emerged tiny little baby jackals. They were really cute but it was too late to stay so we will come back to them again when we get a chance.

664 images today. 6295 pictures to go...

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View pictures of the lions from Little Governors' Camp.

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