Today began at 0445 and by 0530 we were off on a Game Drive. We had a super drive, we saw a few Wahlberg’s eagles, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, impala and the highlight was seeing the cheetah and her cub, they were really playful today, play fighting and jumping around, it was so beautiful to watch.
We sat there for ages and then moved on to our drinks break. We looked at quite a few tracks and then carried on our drive. We did a bit of conservation work, moving a couple of trees that the elephants had pushed over out of the road.
We also saw a really cool ants nest and a beautiful kingfisher.
We got back to the gate and then drove back to camp for a brunch of burger, chips and salad.
I spent the afternoon revising some more 4 x 4 and some trees as well. At 1530 off we went for another Game Drive. We drove for a while, stopping at various trees and birds but not seeing a single mammal. We spent a while using our bird books to identify this bird – a red headed weaver.
We came across a line of ants crossing the road, they went on for ages, and as they have right of way we turned around and went for a drinks break by the river instead. After our drinks we carried on driving, then we got a puncture. We stopped to change that and then began on our way again.
We had just began again when we heard on the radio that the 4 x 4 group was stuck and another car to help get them out. We went on a ferrari safari, with a little siren playing from the radio and off we went – we went past a few giraffe and wildebeest – our mammals for the drive on the way. When we got there the cars weren’t too stuck, the problem was that one of the cars wouldn’t switch on, so had no power of its own and couldn’t contribute to getting itself out, and the other one does not sound healthy. We’ve already established that I’m not a car expert but even I can tell when a car sounds severely screwed up! We spent the next three hours trying to free the cars, we built lines of rocks so that the car could get some grip (rather than loose sand), we used the third car to help pull, we all pushed as hard as we could. It got dark so we had to use the spotlight to check for wild animals too, luckily we didn’t see anything. We eventually got the cars free and up the slope, our car took the lead driving home and the second car (the unhealthy sounding one) pulled the other one.
We eventually made it back to camp, quite a bit later than usual. We had chicken pie and vegetables for dinner, did a quick group 4 x 4 study session, showers and then collapsed into bed, well past my normal bedtime!
It certainly was in interesting day and the best practical 4 x 4 training experience going, an actual real rescue and especially with the added drama of it getting dark in a park with real life wild animals potentially lurking around every corner or coming down to the water for drinks!