Heading on safari

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By Chris this time.





We woke up in the morning and I had a bacon cheese tomato omelette. When we were about to leave to the airport we met a couple Adam and Sarah who were from New York and we shared a taxi bus to the airport. They talked about their jobs, and they were both literature professors and I showed Sarah my Ricky Ponting book as an example of Australian literature. Adam was originally from London so he got the joke.



We got on the plane and everyone was squished up so the pilot asked Mum if she wanted to come up to the front seat but Mum let me go up instead. When I got up there I had to put on four different seatbelts and I had hundreds of knobs and buttons in front of me. I spent three quarters of the time wondering what they were doing and was curious about what they could do so I did want to touch them but I didn’t.



When we landed a guide called Sean picked us up in an open jeep. When we were going to Kirkmans Camp we saw an impala and Sean kept on going and we knew he had seen the impala as well so we asked why he did not stop and he replied that we would see hundreds of those. We did stop when we saw some baboons but they ran away. The other animal we saw on the way was a Kudu which is a really big antelope. Before we knew it, we were there and were being welcomed by all the staff and were told about the point system of all the animals. The point system works like this if the animal was extremely rare it would be worth 200 points, if not that rare 1 or 10 points. Leopards were 200 and imapalas were 1 point. There was one other thing on the scoreboard and it was a thing saying “The Kill” worth 200 points. IF you saw all 10 ten “star birds”(the rarest birds) you got 500 bonus points.



We went to our room, got changed and had a look around, had beer battered fish and salad for lunch and after that we went to the pool to have a swim. We were jumping in trying to catch the tennis ball.



At 4pm before we went into the jeep we met Elvis our tracker who had been at the Camp for 14 years. Just to give you an idea of how good he was, when we were coming back at night time, while moving at 20kph, Elvis spotted a tiny green chameleon in tree. I just couldn’t believe it. So we got on our way to go find some animals. Originally we were trying to find lions but we saw so many other animals we didn’t get to the area where the lions were. In the first few minutes Elvis spotted a giraffe’s head one or two kilometres away, then we saw the impala and wildebeest together and a single young hyena walking down the road, right next to our jeep. My favourite part was when I spotted two rhinos when everybody else was looking at some buffalo. Sean was very excited at finding the rhinos and we were very close to them and we saw a bird right inside the rhinos ear picking away a bugs.



After a while we moved up the river and saw a raft of 5 hippos and they were all staring at us. A couple of times the hippos lifted their heads out of the water and gave a few yawns. Eventually we moved on and we saw an elephant and it looked pretty big to me. Then we stopped and had a drink near a giant fig tree which Sean said was about 600 years old and it had a lot of buffalos underneath it. I had lemonade and beef jerky while Mum had a Gin and Tonic. By now it was getting dark so we got back into the jeep with Elvis using a spot light. There was a bush in front of a turn in the path and we didn’t realise there was a mother and baby elephant just around the corner in the road so Sean immediately put the car in reverse and we went screaming back down the road and took another path. On the way back Elvis heard some hyenas laughing and we went straight to them along an old abandoned railway. When we got there immediately we saw a hyena with a rib cage hanging out of its mouth. After that the hyenas started to scurry around the jeep and Elvis had to put his legs up on the bonnet. The smell was horrendous and everyone blocked their nose. We heard the hyenas laughing and there was a hyena about a metre away and we heard it crunching through the bone. Sean and Elvis think the hyenas stole the leopards kill because the leopard didn’t get the impala up the tree.



We went back to the camp and recorded what we saw on the point board before dinner. I was really tired and struggled to go to sleep. I thought the first safari drive was amazing but I needed to go bed.

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Comments

[Grandma]

Points
You must have ended up with a LOT of points judging by the numbers of animals you were able to photograph!!!