And we’re off – it’s 6:00am and we’re braving the ugly roads on the way to Mfuwe, the closest town to South Luangwa National Park!!!
One of the good things about starting so early is that we arrive at Flatdogs Camp at 9:00am, so we have the rest of the day to enjoy our latest temporary home. It’s located on the southern side of the Luangwa River, which is one of the borders of South Luangwa National Park. Unlike other places we’ve been, there are no fences around Flatdogs, which means many of the animals go through the camp to get in and out of the park.
And because it happens to be pretty quiet when we arrive, we’re given the best safari tent on site, where we quickly make ourselves comfortable…
The reason it’s deemed the BEST tent is because it’s situated on our own private “lagoon”, where we have no neighbours, except for a family of elephants…
A bushbuck…
A stork…
A puku and a party of baboons.
Seriously. Within our first hour at Flatdogs we see hippos, baboons, vervet monkeys, elephants, crocodiles, a monitor lizard and lots of birds.
This is definitely a special place.
We sign up for the night safari drive as we have yet to go on a safari at night… makes sense, don’t it?
Eric and I spend the day in anticipation for the drive and when the time comes, we luck out for two reasons:
The first is that before our drive, they serve us tea and snacks and today’s snack is brownies.
Secondly, we are the only ones in our group, which means we are alone with our guide, our spotter and one of the managers of the camp, who also happens to be a guide. It doesn’t take them long to start filling our heads with great information about sausage trees, elephants and the unique type of giraffe found only in South Luangwa Park.
These giraffes are smaller and marked differently than the typical giraffes we have previously seen.
On our way to the sundowner spot – “sundowners” is a fancy way of saying “drinks at sunset” – we find ourselves staring down a few African buffalos…
… and just when we think it’s cocktail time, Yotem and Timoth – our guide and our spotter – follow the signs of the wild and find us a leopard.
This particular leopard is well-known to the guides, is remarkably mild-tempered and fondly referred to as “Alice”. At one point she walks so close to our truck Eric could reach out and touch her.
About a kilometer past Alice, we stop for sundowners, where we’re allowed to get out of the truck – which explains why we drove about a kilometer past Alice.
As far as Eric and I are concerned, after seeing a leopard any other wildlife we see is just icing on the cake… or brownie, if you will.
With that said, we have a very successful second half - we see civets, elephant shrews, genets, bushbabies, scrub hares, zebras, waterbucks, a pride of lionesses and hippos out of the water.
And as luck would have it, about 5 minutes before we leave the park, our spotter spots a spotted hyena bolting across the road.
As you can see, this guy was moving fast so we’re lucky to catch him.
Eric and I are flying high when we return to camp. After a nice meal we retire to our tent only to find a hippo in our lagoon. So we fall asleep to the sound of him gulping down whatever it is he was gulping down.
The next day is a day of rest.
We had left our schedule open for the possibility of taking another game drive, but after last night’s success we’re satisfied filling our day lounging around the area.
No comments:
Post a Comment