Laikepia

The day began once more to the sound of Nim’s watch and phone almost simultaneously beeping and ringing us awake, bright and early. The fact that it wasn’t all too bright as the sun hadn’t woken up yet made it even harder to haul ourselves out of bed. Juice, coffee and cookies were deposited outside the tent again for our wake up call which were well and truly enjoyed. As the cookies haven’t been gluten free I have been able to eat both of them, taking one for the team! We meandered down to the mess tent for fresh fruit and drinks before jumping into the trucks to go exploring. 

We took the trackers out again but we went looking for the wild dogs for the morning. On the way we also spotted many of the other animals, zebra, impala, dicdics, scrap hares, some elephants, guineafowl and giraffes. The dogs were found chilling in the sun in their pack, 3 adults with their 5 puppies from last year. They were so calm with us around which meant we could have a good look and see them in a solid amount of detail. 

We headed back for breakfast of eggs, although mine got lost somewhere as I think someone else ate them! We also had sausages, toast and pancakes. Nim got delivered a tray with a selection of gluten free pancakes and toast as the camp have been great on making sure he’s being fed correctly. Much appreciated by the both of us! 

After breakfast we all grabbed swimming things, flipflops and made sure we had sun cream on. I needed the factor 50 whereas Nim opted for the 30. We made our way down with Steve, Ollie, Jasper ( another of the guides ) and another family to a part of the river where we could do some rafting. Nim and I jumped in with Ollie, who steered but didn’t always have the best direction. The ranch has 4 dogs; Boris, Trigger, Philly and Buster and they all decided ( with Steve’s permission ) that they wanted to come and play too. Trigger was the happiest in the water whereas the other three decided to stay on the bank running alongside us with Jasper. Trigger did get hauled into Steve’s boat when he got tired before Steve took him back to the bank for Jasper to look after. 

We found some rapids which Steve attempted first to make sure that it was alright to play on. The other family were taken down, one at a time, by their dad whereas I got into the front of Steve’s raft and he splashed our way down. Ollie bought Nim down and I think Ollie had great fun as he volunteered to take both Nim and I down again. It was lots of hard work lugging the rafts up around the sand to get back to the top but it was well worth it. Once we had played, we continued down the river drifting in the nice current until we spotted some Hippos. We decided we wouldn’t play with them, as we knew we wouldn’t win so we jumped back into the truck, which Jasper had driven down along the river by us. 

We made our way down to the waterfall we had been to for sundown yesterday where we scrambled over some more of the rocks, Nim and I found it so much easier barefooted rather than in Vans. Jasper jumped into one of the rafts and paddled out to check if there were any hippos by slapping the water with a paddle and making grunting hippo noises. It was very funny to watch and once he confirmed there wasn’t any in the pool then we went to play! We all clambered up more of the rocks to get to a rock ledge overlooking the pool. It was a lot of fun jumping in from the ledge, but I did ask Ollie to go first so I had someone to follow!

After we had all had some time messing around, we headed out to meet the rest of the campers ( who didn’t come with us ) for some lunch. On the way back to the ranch after lunch, we had a small encounter with an elephant where he didn’t seem to like us and was giving us a showdown. We all stayed very quiet and let him calm down before we continued back to camp. 

For the afternoon, after tea and cake, we headed off to see the wild dogs again as we hoped that they would be hunting at this time of day. Luck so had it that they were hunting and we got to track them to see the start of a hunt and observe what they caught. The dogs are fast and their usual lunch is dicdic. They make a twittering sound while they hunt so they know where the others are and also to communicate during the hunt. It’s so interesting to watch and see how it all works. 

We had sundown a way away from the pack and I spotted on the way home. We saw a hippo, some impala, more dicdics, scrap hares and an elephant but not a lot else. Dinner and bed was in order as it had been a jam packed day!