Our last game drive at Ngala. It was cloudy when we woke & we did get a few drops of rain during our drive. Our mission was to find the rest of the pride of lions that the brother & sister belonged to. The rangers had heard lions calling during the night. We set off in a coordinated manner with frequent radio calls between Jeeps regarding tracks & who checked where, after a while a call came about the sister lion being spotted & not long after the brother was spotted with meat. We headed to a waterhole & found the lion under a bush protecting his prey, a male buffalo, Shaun thinks the buffalo probably died in the waterhole possibly of old age (we did see 2 older male buffalos in a waterhole, too old to keep up with the rest of the herd) the lion had managed to drag the buffalo out of the water. Amazing, the strength that would have been required to drag that buffalo. It looked like he’d had his fill but there was still quite a bit of meat left on the carcass. We left the brother to his guarding duty with a large number of vultures & also hyenas closing in & continued to look for the rest of the pride. We saw a mother rhino & her calf but they walked away from the Jeep twice so we didn’t pursue, she had a huge horn. We saw the anti poaching plane a number of times fly over & learnt about the canine anti poaching unit who now have attack dogs.
The dogs have collars which can be tracked from a vehicle meaning more ground can be covered, they used to track with dogs on long leads. They use bloodhounds & another American dog but Shaun obviously isn’t into dogs. We dropped Thomas our tracker off to see if he could locate lion tracks & stopped for our coffee & Amarillo, toileting was made a little more comfortable with the aid of a pit stop bag. The bag contained a shovel, toilet paper, brown paper bags & hand sanitiser. We finished up our coffee & went to collect Thomas, no luck with the rest of the pride but we did later see the Mum & her calf & her adopted calf so 5 rhinos today. We then spotted an elephant at a small waterhole, Shaun commented how clean his tusks were but not for long, we spent about 10 mins watching him douse himself with mud & lay in the mud, 1 side was fine but when he stood up & attempted to get his other side in the mud he totally missed the waterhole & ended up more out of the mud than in it, it was very amusing. On game drives we’ve also spotted the slender & dwarf moongoose, Mitchel eagle amongst a number of other birds. We returned to the lodge for breakfast & watched a red billed hornbill again stealing nuts from the breakfast buffet, we showered & completed our packing & made our way to reception to await our driver. We left Ngala to hugs & waves. On our way to the airport it rained, we saw large troops of baboons eating the Amarillo fruit & about 50 cows. The airport was quite busy but we boarded a 50 seater plane & made our way back to Johannesburg with an onwards flight to Casablanca via Dubai.