Saturday 11th January 2014

I’m still shattered when the morning drums are sounded but I’m finding it easier to get up. I tend to be awake before we are officially woken at 04.30 due to the room’s resident bats squeaking and crawling around.

The tally chart of encounters grew by three today, all buffalo. The first one in the morning was nice and controlled, we approached a loan bull, who turned out not to be on his own. We watched from 100m before it and a second bull moved off.

We had a second encounter that morning, this was was more of a surprise. We were looking at impala tracks, Alan was interpreting how they walk which is very different to other antelope. As he was doing this a buffalo cow approached us from in-between two large fever berry trees at about 20m away. We reacted by doing nothing but watching her before she ran off in the other direction continuously turning to check us out down her nose.

We had a day off exercise and instead drove 20k to try and pick up phone signal, I was wanting to upload the blog and also email a few people. No luck for those like me with Vodacom, so the contact with the outside world will have to be non existent for the next month, this should enhance the wilderness experience for me.

The afternoon walk was long and hot through the fever tree forest. Our third encounter was a small herd of buffalo feeding in the long grass 80m parallel to where we were walking. We watched them although visibility was not good, we could only see the tops of their heads and the red-billed and yellow-billed oxpeckers sat on their backs.