A gallic theme for the week

Allez les Bleus!

We have a French family over for a week. Unluckily for them they came on the day that les verts gave them a hiding in Croker in Dublin. I couldn’t resist giving them a bit of stick so we had a good nights fun slagging each other. They are from the South of France near Montpellier. Not much English but with my limited French we seem to be able to get by. We’ve been out a couple of times doing activities which have been quite cool. We went to visit a Hippo called Jessica today. She was orphaned in 2000 and was taken in by a farmer called Tony. He hand reared her and she’s now a fairly hefty 1000 Kg! She’s had all the TV crews out to film stories about her and even Braveheart himself has been out to see her when he was here.

She gets fed her daily mealies, dog food and some Rooibos tea. We fed her the mealies and it’s quite cool to be so close to the animal responsible for around 15,000 deaths in Africa every year! We also went to a secluded waterfall after hiking through the bush and went on a boat cruise. It’s been a cool few days and the French kids are really enjoying themselves.

It’s there first foreign trip and they are getting to do some cool stuff. We even stopped off to visit a 4000 year old tree! We’ve been out walking and driving in the reserve and we saw the Black Rhino the other day. I hadn’t seen them for a good while and we also saw two Hyaena. It’s been good to be kept busy. The lodge is fine but I’m here for the bushwalks and the drives and not really interested in the other bullshit that goes with a lodge. I’m gonna have a few visitors over the course of the next 5 months so that’s gonna make things better.

I did get some slagging last night when Georgia scored first but good auld Robbie Keane got us out of jail and the frogs were well beaten by the Argentines. It was a bad week in sport for the French but as they say every dog has it’s day.

Cheetah

Xinkankanka

I’ve learned to tailor my drives to suit guests aspirations. I’ll give you an example. I showed a couple of guests a Kori Bustard which is Africa’s largest flying bird. You’d say that they would be happy but no chance. Not even a picture taken of this beautiful bird. It weighs about 19kg so its some bird and when it flies and spreads it’s wings you’ve got to be impressed! Anyway I came up with some nice animals regardless and one was actually a bird!

There is nothing more beautiful than a young animal learning from it’s mother and with a mixture of adult seriousness and childish playfulness. Well that’s what I showed these guests when we came upon a pair of Xinkankanka(Cheetah) They are harder to see than Lions out here and I had to get a few shots of them. As you’ll probably agree a pretty majestic animal. They were in playful mode though and with no sign of an Impala around we knew they would chill out for a while and we spent an amazing half an hour just watching them. It was definitely the highlight of the day.

I had been talking to some of the other guides in the Lodges in our conservancy and they told me that the Leopard was back. One of the guides who had taken guests on a walk had actually seen it one morning. The Leopard had killed a couple of Impala quite close to our Lodge. With this in the back of my mind I came around the corner the other morning and I spot these tracks in the sand. I stopped abruptly and checked the big prints on the ground. I took some pictures. I was nearly positive that they were Leopard tracks until further investigation. I am a major fan of Leopards but not at these kind of close quarters! They turned out to be canine tracks. There are a few dogs in the conservancy so I presume they went for a little walk during the night! Not a great idea considering the aforementioned presence around and about the place.