29 August - Night Drive

I am sitting in the afternoon sunshine, nice and warm and thinking about how cold I am likely to be later when we head out into the reserve tonight for an evening barbecue and a night drive to see things from a slightly different perspective.

It has been an easy morning although once again on the drive out we saw little in the way of wildlife. Today's activity was visiting the Born Free Foundation (those of us of a certain age will recall the story of the organisation and Elsa the lion in the film 'Born Free') and where we worked at last week. Those of us that worked there last week were treated to a tour of their facilities, five large and segmented compounds with four lions and a couple of leopards rescued from poor conditions around the world. The rest worked in one of the compounds and we joined them for a short period after our tour had finished. If I were in a friend's horse field I think the job I carried out would be called 'poo picking' but here it included the gnawed bony remains of animal carcasses (the lion was safely away in a holding compound, in case you were wondering).

After lunch back at the lodge we had a couple of hours to relax before heading back out into the reserve for the barbecue (or brie as they call it here) followed by the night drive. The night drive is something that is done every two weeks, a couple of hours driving around the reserve, a dim torch being used to illuminate the surroundings in the hope of seeing some of those animals more active at night. I was holding the torch and swinging it slowly back and forth as we drove along looking for the reflection of eyes at which point we would stop and try and illuminate more clearly whatever it was that we had found. Again we were to be sadly disappointed. We saw the eyes of what Jamie told us was a hyena but never saw the animal. Two or three times we saw the eyes of groups of small animals that hop around. Again we never saw the animals but watching pairs of pinpoints of light hopping around the place added a slightly comical twist to the evening. Jamie spotted a hippopotamus a distance away but all I could make out was a dark shape and a red prick of light; for me it could have been anything. We did see a herd of elephants, which we did not stay to watch as apparently elephants are less predictable at night, a group of giraffes (the proper collective noun is a 'tower' of giraffes apparently, I kid you not) but other than that there was precious little reward for our two hours huddled in the cold of the vehicle.