July 18, 2002 – Safari
It’s about nine o’clock in the morning on the 18th of July; today’s dispatch comes to you after the most amazing morning.
We push hard on these safaris, we certainly enjoy the luxury of the lodges, I think I’ve described that to you, it’s pretty deluxe.
We’re up early, we want to push hard so that we get as much as we can out of each day.
Raphael and Adam met us in the early morning darkness again today and we took off to see the action we could find and we were very much rewarded. In particular we saw a lot of lion action today, one of the best lion days I’ve ever had on safari. We saw two different prides or groups of lions, a lot of movement in the early morning light when it’s still cool. We saw one group of females of course, who do all the hunting and work, we couldn’t tell at first if they were stalking or they were going to a kill that already happened, but we took countless photographs of these beautiful animals in the early morning light. Later we found out what was going on, as they were actually moving to chase away a leopard that had moved into their territory. We stopped and enjoyed watching the leopard as she moved on in the early morning light.
Now we have only been going about 3 hours, but we’ve stopped for what we call a bush breakfast. The staff back at the hotel packed up our picnic baskets with china, quiche, several kinds of fruit, bacon, pretty deluxe breakfast. We stopped at one of these Kojpes that I described to you. Old granite outcroppings that rise up over the Serengeti plain. Raphael got out and checked to make sure that lions had left us our breakfast spot this morning and didn’t want to claim it for their own. And when he cleared the area, we climbed up on to these granite mounds, these granite pieces of rock and spread out our picnic breakfast in the still very soft early morning light. We were just up there enjoying the expansive view of Serengeti around us.
So it’s been a great morning so far, almost more has happened today then I can even describe to you. We will still be out on this game drive until noon then will return to the Sopa Lodge for lunch and from there, Adam and myself will remain with Mary and Karen until they get their flight back to Arusha. The rest of the group will load into a Land cruiser with Adam and head over to Olduvai Gorge and on to Ngorongoro, where the remaining Berg Adventures safari group will meet up this evening, probably pretty exhausted from a very full day to get some rest for the rest of our adventures.
