Date of Entry:November 22nd 2016
Date of Writing: April 18th 2017
After spending a few days just relaxing in Livingstone and enjoying getting to know some Zambians and saving some money by not paying for big excursions I decide I should have at least one more adventure in Zambia before my flight back to South Africa tomorrow, so I book an early morning safari in the one national park near Livingstone: Mosi-oa-tunya National park. I’ve wanted to go back to chobe in Botswana which is super close, but with the visa costs added it’s just too expensive, If I want any money left in my next few weeks in South Africa and Lesothu. I’m met early morning at Fawlty Towers hostel and driven the 45 minutes to the small national park on the Zambezi river. There’s no big cats here, but there’s just about everything else. It’s a misty cloudy cool morning with lots of rain as we pick up our other 4 safari members and hop into an open air jeep at the national park entrance. It doesn’t take long to see some animals including a hippo making a quick entrance on the opposite bank of the river.
We continue on with our awesome guide whose name I sadly forget and I get my first glimpse of a juvenile giraffe in the wild. Our guide estimates it’s less than a year old but it seems spooked by our presence and quickly moved away from the road. We also find some hornbills and a big heard of buffalo grazing in a field.
As we keep driving through the intermittent rain and come across a big herd of baboons making there way across a field covered in red leaves. Watching one particular baby hitching a ride yields some pictures I’m pretty proud of and I can’t get over just how cute and human the very little babies are. This little one doesn’t seem interested in making things easy for it’s mum.
As we drive on to the very edge of the national park through an old abandoned village with rotting houses the animals sometimes use as shelter, I catch a flittering fluorescent purple bird that I can not identify or even get a good picture of, but at least I’ll show you the fascinating colour of it’s plumage.
As we keep driving we spot an Adult giraffe just standing there on the road. I’ll never get sick of staring at these silent giants who hold about them some sort of aura of power. They’re one of my favourite characters on the African Savannah.
After a brief stop in heavy rain for a snack of muffins and yogurt in a lean to shelter our guide decides he likes our group and so invites us for a special treat and something you normally pay a lot more for in town. He drives us to some park rangers whose job it is to track the rhinos of the park. They are heavily armed and it is pouring rain but that doesn’t dampen my excitement as I climb out of the jeep and we start moving towards where the rhinos are. Sadly most of them have run off to find better shelter from the torrential rain, but there remains a mum and baby lying down under a small shrub. As we get close we have to fall back a bit as the mum signals to us that she’s a little threatened, but still being out walking with these incredibly huge and totally wild animals is an insane experience.
Eventually we continue onwards driving along as the rain starts to subside. We don’t find much for a while, just a large crane and a big lizard lurking near the shore, but I’m still feeling amazing from our rhino walk experience.
Our open air jeep comes to an abrupt halt suddenly as we’re heading towards the exit of the park. Just a short distance off across a narrow patch of the Zambezi is a big group of hippos frolicking between the water and land, birds following everywhere they go. We sit and watch with joy as the big hippos nuzzle each other, swim and eat grass.
In the last moments as we sit and watch I even snap a few more photos of one yawing as two nuzzle together behind, definitely some of my favourite hippo shots from the trip.
