Safari

Greetings!

We are back from the Safari at the South Luangwa park and we are all safe and we had a great time.  We headed out there on Friday morning along the way to the park the Pluggers visited a few of their ex-patriot friends in Chipata (a pretty big city). Italians who have lived in the country for a long time, we had tea and a nice visit they have an amazing garden so much different vegetation.  We stopped at the mission house in Chipata for a sack lunch and then made our way to the park.  Even before we got to the lodge we started to see some of the animals around, we saw the monkeys (which are around quite a bit, not just at the lodge) and we saw animals like impalas. We got to the lodge, it was called Marula Lodge and it was a very nice place to stay.  The bathrooms were out in the open, but they had a bamboo fence around them.  So when you were using the bathroom you could look up and see monkeys swinging around in the trees and bush babies up there, kind of strange but pretty neat, that is also the room where you showered too so it was kind of out in the open.  Apparently the toilet paper was getting stolen by cheeky monkeys so they put the paper in the monkey proof tins, here you can see Dodger's uncle is disappointed that he can't get at the toilet paper, argh! foiled again!

That night that we got there we didn't really do too much we were getting there at sundown so there wasn't really enough time to go out for a drive and we were all kind of tired from the big day of driving.  But we enjoyed the vegetable lasagne for supper enjoyed our Gin and Tonics (G&T).  That is a popular drink here because this lodge was ran by British people, and I'd say that is probably the predominate group of people that this lodge is geared towards.  There was a British lady staying there also and some Americans and some Dutch people, an Italian guy who was interesting, named Bruno.  It was nice getting to know the fellow guests there at the lodge.  But anyway, we were told that the dining hall was no longer there when we arrived.  Apparently a few months ago a huge tree fell down upon the dining hall and completely destroyed it, also killing a priest and injuring another person.  So that was kind of scary but when you look at the trees that are around you notice that they are all huge the trees grow to mammoth proportions.  But they had other arrangements for our meals.  We ate right on the Luangwa River and could watch elephants and hippos as we ate.  My tent was pretty close by as well, and it opened up right onto the river as well so I could lay in bed and see the hippos go swimming by.  Even though it was a tent 2 full sized twin beds were in it, I had the tent to myself which was nice.  After Josh and Chris taught Sean how to play cribbage we went to bed and I slept really well the first night.

We got up really early on the next day, at 5am! We did that in order to get out into the park by sunrise.  As we were going into the park we saw a family of elephants walking around the check in booth where you pay to get into the park.  I don't know there is just something about baby elephants they are so cute.  I have pictures but I don't want to post a million shots so I'll hold off on that but baby elephants are just the cutest.  The game drive started out really nice we saw a giraffe and lots of birds and other things.  Here is a picture of Josh with the giraffe.  Now this park isn't like a place that is fenced off, but it is just an area of land that is protected from poachers, and of course the animals see people and are pretty used to the trucks, so they aren't really afraid of the trucks or anything at least not usually.  But this is of course a very natural element for them and they are wild.
 
Our game drive guide (David) had heard that some lions had taken down an impala in a certain area in the night so he thought that we would have a good chance of seeing the lion there.  So then we sort of stumbled upon a fully grown male lion as it was going into the bush, I really only had a few seconds to look at it then it went into the bush.  I thought that that would be the end of the lion sighting it was pretty cool but short, but then the guide just drives through the brush and sort of circumvented the lion to sort of get ahead of it and the lion came out of the bush right where he thought it would and we had a great view of it as it walked right by us.  I'll attach a photo of it to show how close this thing got.  Apparently the guide didn't think we were in any danger, it had just had a big meal and it wasn't really hungry

 I've seen lions in the zoo of course but it is impressive to see them out in the wild with absolutely nothing between you and the lion, you realize how big they are how big their paws are and how they could tear you apart not problem if they wanted to.  Well we followed the lion for a little bit as it walked over to a cool place to take a nap.  When he submerged from the bush there was a whole herd of impala that he was walking towards, now the impala hardly even notice the safari trucks, but when the lion came around he got their full attention and they definitely cleared a path for him and didn't mess around.  Well apparently he was a little sleepy after his big meal so he laid down for a while we have some good shots of that I could resist doing a selfie with the lion.

Well I guess after a while a different safari truck saw us and came over and scared away the lion but we had tons of time to get a close look at it.  And get a bunch of pictures.  Once again when I get state side and have unlimited bandwidth I might upload more, I'm trying to keep the uploads down.  But the lion was cool.  We saw all sorts of neat animals in addition though we saw lots of elephants and giraffe, warthogs and impalas and water bucks and pukus.  I can't remember all the birds that we saw but there were some really neat ones like bee-eaters and a different kind of king fishers.  Well, we had our tea out in the bush in the mid morning and did some more animal viewing and we were back by noon.

We had a few hours off before our next drive we swam in the pool that they have and just took it easy, they served homemade pizza that was quite good and then we went out again by 3 for the next drive.  This time we saw alot of the same animals, baboons including an albino one.  We saw lots of giraffes and hippos and neat animals we stopped in one clearing and just looked for a long time because it was so huge there were zebras in the foreground and elephants in the far background and the giraffes were far away but they moved in closer and it was neat to see them all with their stunning backdrop of trees and mountains.  Here's a picture.

Very beautiful.  Well when it was sunset time we found a nice place to have some G&T and a little snack out in the bush and we enjoyed our drinks as we watched the sun set.  But we still had 2 more hours of drive time left because this was a night drive as well.  There was a spotter riding in the front seat who had a big spot light and he was looking for night time animals.  We saw quite a few animals at night, we saw some hyenas I think we saw 4, they are pretty frightening looking, I didn't get any decent pictures because it was dark and they were only visible because of a spotlight.  Josh got a few good pictures.  The animal that you really want to see while you are out at night is the leopard and we were fortunate that we did see a leopard that night it was pretty cool and it got really close to us it basically walked right past our truck we got a few good pictures and it was neat to see.  So in those 2 drives we saw 4 of the 5 big five safari animals we didn't see the water buffalo but I didn't really think that was such a bad thing.  But we got back around 8 or so at night had our supper and then we were off to bed after an eventful evening.  I think I'm going to continue the events of the next day in a different blog post because this one is getting huge.  So I'll end it here and in my next post I'll discus church in the bush and a nature walk.  Bye