Thursday Evening, Jan 8th

The evening game drive brought several surprises for our little group. The first of these was a warthog family with a youngster. They burst out of the bush about fifty yards in front of us and I had to scramble just to get a couple of shots off. Not surprising really as we were probably doing 30mph with Lynn and I in the back row. They didn’t turn out very good at all but I’ve stuck one in the slideshow anyway.

Not long after seeing the warthog family we came upon a herd of elephants with several young ones in tow. One of the babies was so small you could barely see him moving through the grass. IX-T1_XT1B4709_150109 think this is the same little one after he came out of the high grass. A couple of hundred yards down the road we saw another group who were enjoying themselves in a small mud puddle. When we drove up they started moving since we were very close but they were slowed up trying to get the little ones out of the puddle. The sides were too steep and high for the little ones to get out! Several of the big ones got together and with their trunks underneath and pushing got them out quickly.

We later ran across a couple of vultures on the side of the road who weren’t at all flustered by us driving by. How do they train all these animals anyway? Caught up with some more zebras and Big Macs before finding one of the highlights of the trip for me. A pride of lions!

Come on guys, get up! Show a little pride. What a lazy bunch. X-T1_XT1B4809_150109

Lions are the only member of the cat family that form social groups. These are usually dominated by females in the sense that there are 4-5 females in the group and typically not more than two males, and this group was certainly typical with two males, four females, and four juveniles. So funny to watch them rolling over, yawning, and moving around to lay down with someone else. This was around 6pm and they were about ready to get up after spending the afternoon on the shade. Time for their dinner and our evening drinks n the bush!

X-T1_XTGF4054_150108Tonight was special! Thinking we were headed back to the lodge we pulled up to an outdoor bar and entertainment venue. Lots of booze and appetizers. I for one was hungry since lunch was hours ago. We had a beautiful sunset and a very nice temperature for drinks under the stars.

And local entertainment as well with singers and dancers – one of whom was Foster our tracker. We all had a great time on our last night at Tintswalo.

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