04/10 National Park!

Up at 6, and ready to leave for Mapungabwe National Park at 7am. Off to do some observation in one of the bird shelters near a water hole. I think it took us about an hour to get there ( really lost the concept of time) and bumped into a few animals on the way, kudu, giraffe, klipspringer and a ridiculously cute steenbok whose ears are way to big for it's head.

 

 

Once we entered the park we were literally surrounded by animals, baboons, vervet monkeys, impalas and bushbucks. We drove right next to the Limpopo river which is the boarder between South Africa and Botswana.

 

At the hide we had to wait a while before seeing anything but Impala, birds and squirrels (oh and terrapins in the water) but finally, appearing out of nowhere, a herd of elephants with BABIES! It's surprising how something that big can blend in so well with the bush. Even though they don't move particularly fast, they move with so much power. Sounds corny but you could almost feel the ground vibrate with every step. I think they stayed in view for about half an hour and at one point some of them were only about a metre away from the hide. Stretch your arm out of the window and you could have touched them, but obviously not allowed to do that.

So cute!

 

Apart from them, a few warthogs splashed around in the mud and 3 zebras cautiously walked up to the edge of the water hole and ran off pretty quickly, but still AWESOME morning!

Got back to camp at 12:30, and luckily Dave had prepared lunch, fluorescent pink hot dogs :S  I'm sure they were slightly radioactive but still tasty. Spent most of the afternoon cooling down as it was about 40° C in the shade! a perfect mixture of swimming pool, reading and nap.

5:30, set off for our night drive with a quick stop at Luna (another camp on the reserve) and met an elephant at their waterhole; nice.

Driving through a reedy patch, Katie suddenly shouts at Dave to stop and reverse, obviously had seen something good.But this wasn't any normal good, this was a rare one: a caracal. I only saw it run off into the tall grass (still saw it though) but apparently it had just been lying in a dip right next to the road. Soooooo cool, they're basically big cats with massively tufted ears. Quite a calm night after that, with a couple of surprises. I was on spotlight duty with Toni, saw some bushbabies, and scrub hares of course, randomly spotted an elephant about 30 m from the car so we had to turn off all the lights cause they get cranky at night. Toni spotted a wild cat and Justin caught a porcupine out of the corner of his eye, which was pretty amazing.