Hippo Scare

Serengeti Day 2.

Whoa, missed the excitement last night!  About 2:00 a.m. I heard a crunching sound coming from outside my tent.  I didn’t think much of it, thinking that it was some small animal munching on the grass – NOT.

It turns out that Patricia and her daughter, Shauna, who were camping next to me, heard the sound and got up to investigate.  It was pitch dark, as their story goes, and they couldn’t see anything.  One turned her light on and aimed it in the direction of the sound.  As they described it, it was as big as a tank.  They shut down the light and headed back into their tent shaking with fear.  What they found was a huge hippo grazing about five metres from my tent.  Hippos spend the daylight hours in the water and then at night they head out to graze.  Damn, the next time I won’t surmise what is going on, I will investigate.

This morning at 6:00 a.m. and after a quick cup of coffee, we headed off for an early morning safari drive.  We saw and photographed a huge array of animals - zebra, wildebeest, lions, hippo, gazelles, cape buffalo, ostrich, just to name a few, plus all kinds of birds.  After about three hours we headed back to camp for brunch and then packed up our belongings and headed back to Ngorongoro Crater to spend the night there.

The following collage is made up of pictures that I took on the safari drive this morning.

Until then.