First pride

Here are the pictures from last weeks game drives, and our first real lion sighting. We come across lion tracks about once a week. But having them be within two meters of your car is alot more exciting. They, like most animals, like to walk along the soft sand of the road to go long distances before cutting off into one of the veld blocks.

Right near twilight so it was great lighting to capture them, we could smell the faint odder of carcass so they probably killed a small antelope and finished it not long before we got there.

Night adder

This week we split into two groups; one went to Kruger for the day and the other went on a all day game drive, then the groups swapped the next day. With the all day drive we left early and went on our first walking safari for about three hours following a river and cutting though a section of the reserve called thorny thicket. It was perfect weather with nice stratoculumus clouds covering the sky making a nice cool day.

Driving to our walking site

For Kruger we got up at about 3am so we could get to the gate at the 5 am opening time. Then we drove all the way till 12 when we had a lecture set up in Kruger's elephant museum, the lecture focused mostly on the elephant history in the park, why they are proving a problem, and what is being done to try and combat it without just demolishing the population.

Kruger Museum skull

The rest of this week was the two lectures yesterday, one on grass and one on geology both of which might seem uninteresting but I'd have happily sat through lectures twice as long to get more info on them. So expect pictures of rocks and grass if we don't find any game on our next drives.

Still got a few pages of work book to get through and revising for the next three exams on Saturday, and try to get a head start on tracking which is the focus for all of next week. Defiantly excited for that even though it takes our weekend away. The end of that has our first real assessment so we will get our first field-guide qualification once the instructor gives us the exams.