August 10, 2021 (DAY 6 of safari) – by Pamela Hamburg
Headed out at 6am in the dark to get a picture of a stick tree with the sunrise behind it…. You can tell the day didn’t start out great for me. After the sunrise pic, we picked a place to have breakfast and they brought out all the glass cups and porcelain coffee mugs again. Then we did a lot of sitting and waiting for the wildebeests to cross the damn river at different crossing areas. I think we sat for 2+ hours in one place waiting and finally it happened! It was pretty amazing to see thousands of these animals crossing the river. I really wanted to see one get taken down by a croc but I guess they were well fed since we didn’t see any crocs nearby. After one crossing ended, we moved to another spot and saw yet another crossing. This was on the Mara river.
If that wasn’t enough, after lunch we ran into a herd of elephants playing in the water, maybe taking a bath? The smaller ones were having a great time playing in the water. After a good 20 minutes or so, they got out and started eating the grass making their way up the hill to where we were parked. A bunch of them were right by our truck and we got a selfie!
We thought we were done for the day after that since it was 5pm but no such luck. We moved on to find an entire pride of lions (10 in total). There was some really tall grass they came out of, some with blood on their faces. From inside the bush you could hear roaring and growling and eating. We surmised it was the male lion, but he never came out.
Other animals we saw that day: Eland antelope (the largest breed), Topi Antelope on a mound, and hippos.
