Travelling Hopefully - Big Animals and an Unexpected Shampoo Incident

We spent a happy morning trundling around the Ngorongoro crater pestering animals.  There were gazelles, zebras, hippos and more wildebeest than you could shake a stick at but this was a pale shadow of what awaited us in the Serengeti.  The road to the Serengeti is dirt covered with rocks.  This makes for remarkably good going as long as you don't mind your teeth being shaken out of your head every inch of the way.  Once there we set off around the various tracks looking for animals.

There are some stone outcrops and patches of water in the Serengeti but most of the area is largely featureless grassland dotted with acacia trees, or at least the bit we were staying at was.  Wildebeest and zebras tended to stand out but I couldn't imagine larger predator animals successfully hiding themselves there.  Which turned out to be the one of the stupidest things I've ever thought as the Serengeti turned out to be hip deep in larger predator animals.  Lions of course, pulling faces and doing everything except handing out 5 by 8 glossies but also hyenas, serval cats, jackals and leopards.  I didn't really expect to see leopards, knowing them to be both rare and retiring but we saw one on the first day.  Either that or we saw a rolled up leopard skin rug somebody had left up in a tree.

Unlike the lions the hyenas refused to pause for photos but I got a couple of good shots.  I also got some good photos of the leopard/rolled up rug.  In fact the only thing we would not see on our brief stay in the Serengeti was a rhino.  We had seen a couple in Ngorongoro but at such a distance that they might actually have been deformed buffaloes.  Oh yes, we saw buffaloes too, and warthogs, a crocodile plus a few giraffes and ostriches.

After a hot and dusty day pestering endangered species we pulled into our camp to move our belongings into our tents.  This was where I discovered that my shampoo had burst in my pack and that many of my belongings were covered in sweet smelling gunk.  After such an amazing day this minor inconvenience irritated me beyond all rational levels and I was cursing and mopping gunk off my clothes with toilet paper when I became aware that someone was trying to attract my attention.  I responded with a less than coherent account of my shampoo woes.  I don't know what the person said in return but the word "elephant" did appear.  I looked up and there was a rather large elephant raiding our garbage bin.  Everybody else had rather sensibly retreated to the building where our meals were to be produced and we rather gingerly did the same.

Game drives the next day added to our "bag" including an amazing scene of a mother cheetah with three half grown cubs lolling around like house cats.  I didn't have my camera on me for that one much to my dismay but I did manage to get some excellent (although rather graphic) shots of lions tearing a zebra apart the next day.  We were visited by another elephant (or possibly the same one back for more) who raided our other garbage bin and according to others hyenas, giraffes and possibly a lion wandered through our camp in the dead of night.  I say others because I was asleep when all this happened.  According to the people in the tent next to me I snored so maybe the animals gave me a wide berth.

I've made it sound as though the animals simply stepped forward and paraded themselves for us but with the exception of the largest herbivores we probably wouldn't have seen anything without the keen eyes and experience of our safari drivers who time and again would stop next to an innocent patch of grass and encourage us to watch until something impressive stuck its head up.  According to Elysha we were lucky with our spotting but even so the skill of the drivers was almost superhuman.