Toilets and Vultures – by Ellen

Trying not to think about the fact that we were being charged $400/night (≈£40) for the pleasure of camping in what was, essentially, a very cramped and dusty car park, we hammered the tent pegs into the rocky ground. Well, we hammered them and they sort of crumpled and twisted and bent and then a little tiny bit of them poked into the ground. Giving up on pegs we weighed it down by filling it with our stuff, and set off back into the game park. By the time we saw the first lion, we’d even managed to forget about the noisy tour group that had started to set up camp about 2 inches from our tent. But I was soon reminded of my outrage when we stopped at the loo. It was filthy, smelly, broken and disgusting, with no running water and no loo roll. And don’t start with the ‘but you’re in Africa….’ stuff. We were in one of the country’s premier tourist destinations, where each camper – camper – was paying $200/night. And they couldn’t even maintain the toilets. NWbl**dyR.

Anyway…there were the lions, lying in the grass, ears twitching and tails flicking, fully focused on the herd of zebra that was obliviously heading their way. The lioness charged – but she’d been impatient and hasty, and the zebra quickly turned and fled, the lioness giving up a few meters into the chase…exciting stuff none the less!

We did a few days driving round, sometimes seeing lots of stuff: more lions chasing zebras, zebras ‘getting some sexy time’, some cheetah, lots of my favorite antelope oryx (to look at, not to eat – my favorite to eat is eland) and lots of birds to add to Evan’s list - and sometimes seeing no stuff. Possibly the strangest thing we saw was when we were by a watering hole watching the vultures and a Maribou Stork (astoundingly ugly carrion-eating birds which make vultures look really cute and cuddly). One of the vultures was skulking in a typically pensive and depressed vulture-esque way on the top branch of a dead tree. Along came a Maribou Stork, who decided that - as the biggest and ugliest bird in the area - it deserved the highest vantage point from which to scan for any hapless herbivores who may be about to meet an untimely end at the jaws of a crafty carnivore. And so it got the highest vantage point – by landing squarely on the back of the White Backed Vulture. The vulture managed to wriggle free, and then resumed its skulking (in an even more pensive and depressed vulture-esque manner) on a lower branch of the dead tree.