This entry is for Thursday, July 31, 2025.

It is a bit after Noon as I sit here with this view to write about the morning.

Elmo called for us at 5:55am. We were ready. This was the view from our deck as we went out to meet him.

We had a simple breakfast to get our day started.

The sunrises are so beautiful every time. That human silhouette left of center is Ash.

I used the restroom just before we left and couldn’t resist another sunrise shot.

Our drive started at 6:35am. It was the same 46° that it was the day before, but somehow did not feel as cold. 

I haven’t talked much about tracking, but it’s interesting to observe. It’s not just paw prints as we saw yesterday. This morning it started with the “complaining” of a francolin, a common bird here. This particular cry can signal others of danger nearby.

This led Elmo, our guide, down a particular path. Which led to seeing hyenas across the water. As scavengers, they often follow predators hoping for leftovers after a kill. So away we went in the direction of the hyenas.

Along the way, we came across this giraffe just sitting pretty near the airstrip.

After a while, it stood up and started moving away from us.

We moved on past the air strip, drove around a bit more and then found ourselves on the other side of it.

The giraffe was still there, and had been joined by a child.

Shortly after this, we found perhaps the source of the francolin’s and hyena’s interest: leopard tracks from earlier this morning.

We spent more than half of the morning in search of this leopard to no avail. It reminded me of an analogy we heard from a fellow traveler in 2023 who had been on many safaris: it’s like baseball. There are long periods of nothing much and then you get a home run. You could argue that yesterday we had two home runs in the morning with the lions and the cheetah.

But it was beautiful weather and even more amazing terrain and we enjoyed the journey this morning. 

We saw a lot of wart hogs. The two zoomed in photos are actually of the same one, just in different stances.

We saw a couple of hippos in the water channel that flows in front of our lodge. Often, all you see is their ears and eyes above the water like this.

We see Impala all the time, but this was probably the biggest herd we have encountered. And it was just one male amongst 10 or more females.

The terrain itself was in some ways the star of the morning. Maybe we were paying more attention to it as we were keeping our eyes out for a leopard. It is so different to our 2023 trip. We never saw a speck of green then and now it’s everywhere. There is also a red grass that I love here and there, as seen in the top photo above, that I don’t remember from before. And of course the water itself and the beautiful reflections it provides make it seem like a completely different place.

This is the same channel of water in front of our lodge that we saw before. Our lodge is on the far left in the top photo, enlarged in the first photo. The two hippos are on the right. They may or may not be the same ones we saw earlier. They both have birds on their head who feed off of insects that gather on them. They do the same with buffalo and elephants.

We stopped at 9:30am for a coffee and pee break. We relaxed here for about 30 minutes then went back to camp, arriving about 10:30.

Lunch would be served after 11 AM so we had some time to kill. It was now 71° so I found a place in the sun at the lodge and enjoyed the warmth and the view before they announced lunch was ready.

It is now just 12:35pm so we have almost 3 hours to rest, shower, recharge our phones, and enjoy the great weather and view from our deck.

A couple of Ash’s photos from the evening drive yesterday.

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By the time we went over to the lodge for tea it was 79 degrees so I dressed for that. And it was the perfect choice for the next activity.

Our afternoon activity was a water safari. There were a lot of video clips so I made a little movie of it. The star of the afternoon was a pod of hippos. We spent about 35 minutes watching them. The video is just 1:17 of the 2.5 hours we were out so just the highlights.

We had dinner at 7:30 and to our rooms at 8:30.

We leave here tomorrow morning and start the trek back home. I will do a final post on a layover or when I get home on Sunday.