18 Sept 09- Morning Game Drive

The First Full Day at Mashatu

In my normal life I am not what you would call a "morning person." On vacation however, I seem more than willing to get up early, especially if I have COFFEE right quick.
Instant coffee was in our room at Mashatu, but fortunately real coffee was ready every morning up at the main common/eating area, along with breakfast. Good food and excellent coffee which I was generally one of the first to sample.

We met up with our driver and our riding companions for breakfast and then headed out to the truck every day before sunrise. (A note on the trucks: I am generally not a fan of Toyota cars, but the Toyota trucks in use at Mashatu were execellent: fairly smooth given the terrain and handled the conditions without difficulty. Ok, some of the credit for that does go to our driver Elvis, but if the Toyota wasn't good at the rough stuff, no amount of driving talent would have helped.)

On to describing the drives: words fail me pretty much. The area is beautiful although at the time of year we were there it was the end of winter and often severe and bare of growth. Beautiful nonetheless.

We usually began to see animals immediately upon leaving camp, and it never took long for the awe to set in.

The morning drive on the 18th was a special one: there is research done at Mashatu on both predators and elephants, and we were on the Ivory Drive escorted by one of the researchers as well as our regular guides.

Great guy, knowledgeable and he was as awed by all we saw as we were, I think. (Hard not to be.) And it was an amazing morning:
we did in fact see the elephants we were looking for, but we also stumbled into an amazing situation with a leopard and some baboons!

The leopard was resting in a tree and a baboon came wandering by. We learned that the baboons really do not like leopards and will often gang up on them.
As they tried on this day.

One baboon saw the leopard and called for more of his group to come and help the attack.

While it was just the one baboon, the leopard was not nervous nor did he move other than to bare his fangs a bit. The baboon was yelling and going nuts- but not getting TOO close. One baboon VS a leopard is likely to end badly for the baboon. A few baboons VS a leopard is likely to end badly for the leopard however!

When more baboons began to arrive the leopard did get out of his tree and move off slowly, being followed by the baboons. It was not exactly a high speed chase, mostly just walking, but the leopard was definitely getting away from the baboons. He was in territory he knew though and had a spot in mind: inside a tight thorn bush that pretty much made it impossible for more than one babboon at a time to get near him.

This really pissed off the baboon that first found the leopard, who stuck close by for a while. The other baboons wandered off.

This was just one of the "National Geographic" encounters we had. (I call them that because some of the wildlife programs tell about how difficult it is to view some of the activities of animals in the wild, and we were fortunate enough to see things that felt that amazing every time we left camp, I think.)

A note on wildebeest: our second guide, Aaron, called them crazy wildebeest and seemed to enjoy them quite a bit. I got a kick out of them too after a short while. Nearly anytime there were more than 3 or 4 together it seemed that one of them would suddenly and for no apparent reason just begin to run around a bit at full speed. Often others would join in. They would run like that for a few hundred yards and then just stop, or go back to a slow walk.

The description doesn't do the behavior justice- much funnier to see than to read about!

I have many more pictures in the gallery for that morning, and more stories to try and tell, but that is all for this moment.

Morning Game Drive

139 images

Birds

Elephant Tale

Landscapes

Leopard VS Baboon