Zambia/Ebony Lodge - Day Three/Day One

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We had to depart Zambia in the early afternoon so we started out at 6am for our final river cruise with Godfrey. We still hadn’t seen any elephants so Godfrey said we might see them crossing the river in the early morning hours. Boy was he right. We saw three different groups of elephants for a total of 16. They are great swimmers and cross the river by sticking their trunk out of the water where it is deep. They pretty much stay in single file and sometimes rest halfway through. Once upon the shore, two juvenile males played in the shallow water. On another bank, a large male tried to scare us by folding out his ears and trumpeting. We knew we were safe in the boat but I did gasp a little. We were within 15 feet of a real wild elephant. So now, we had seen 2 of the Big Five.

On the way back to the lodge, we saw a huge crocodile on the shore who eventually slithered into the water.

It was sad saying goodbye to Godfrey and the entire staff but it was time to go back into South Africa to the Singita Ebony Lodge. We boarded a plane in Livingstone which flew us to Nelspruit, South Africa where were immediateply met by a guy who took us back through customs and loaded us on a 12 seater Cessna prop plane where two Singita pilots flew us to our next lodge (it was only the pilots and the two of us on board). After a 25 minute flight, we were met at the entrance to Ebony Lodge and quickly shown to our suite before heading out with Jonty, our guide, and Lewis, his spotter.

We loaded up in the Land Rover and headed out in the savannah where we were immediately driven to two leopards, a mother and her son. The mother had recently taken down an impala but her son had taken it away from her and hung it up in a tree to keep it away from the hyenas. They were both full of impala meat by the time we saw them so they were just laying in the grass, the male guarding the carcass in the tree and the mother further away wanting the impala for herself. We were within 30 feet of the male leopard and it pretty much ignored us. After driving around for another hour and seeing lucky living impalas and some monkeys, we headed back to the lodge to unpack, have dinner and go to bed so we’d be ready for a 4:30am wake up call. By the way, our suite has its own pool, so we jumped in there to cool off before dinner.

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Photos

Another view of the son
The mother was too far away for a good shot

what was left of the impala
By the next morning, nothing was left as the hyenas saw to that.

Comments

[Nancy Wirick]

Postcard Worthy
"Another view of the sun". Just wow.