Wrong again. No surprise really, as I make a habit of it. I may have mentioned earlier that I had pretty much given up on the game-spotting aspects of the remainder of the trip following Serengeti & Ngorongoro. They had been so fantastic that nothing could follow them, surely.
However, today was elephant day. Our first outing began, in 4x4s, at 0600. Thus reveille was at 0515. The drive lasted three hours, and we got up close and personal with herd after herd. And I mean real close. At one point a herd, even with two or three young, passed within two metres of the vehicle. We just halted on the track and waited for their approach. I could have leaned out and touched them. This was both exciting and somehow not quite right. It felt incongruous that wild animals should be getting to a stage of fraternising with humans in this way. Good for photos, though.
Brunch was taken on our return to camp, the monkeys having been chased off. One had stolen our cauliflower the previous evening, so everyone was now on red alert. Also running back & forth through the camp, as if in a Brian Rix farce from the sixties, was a family of warthog, mum, dad and five tinies.
The second outing was water-borne, starting at 1500. This was, by now for us, a tad underwhelming. Crocodiles, hippos, buffalo, giraffe and fish eagles have become just a little old hat by now. Blasé?
Barbecue tonight.
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