Exploring Tanzania(Day 2)

Welcome back to my blog! Today we are going to explore more of our visit to Chem Chem!

After a restful sleep, I woke up to an army of baboons lingering in front of our tent. Thankfully, we had our monkey-proof zipper, which made sure they wouldn't sneak into our tent at night, even though it is quite the hassle to put on every time we left and entered the tent. We then got ready, enjoyed a delightful meal, and headed out for another game drive.

The drive from the lodge to the biggest part of the concession was about 15 minutes, where we drove on civilian roads, through farms, and through tall grasses. On this seemingly uneventful ride we saw this group of impalas! Unfortunately, they were quite shy, and hurried away as soon as they could hear our jeep. When we saw these guys, we learned that they can jump up to an astounding 3 meters high and 11 meters in distance!

As we drove around, we saw some more zebras and wildebeest munching on foliage as our guide led us to an open plain full of tall grass. We followed a small 'path' that was really just a stretch of grass that was matted from the game drive jeeps going over the same part over and over. To give you an idea of how remote this place was, it was about a one hour drive from the main road closest to the Chem Chem lounge, and was literally just a massive plain covered in tall grass and the occaisonal shrub. While we were searching around here, our guide stumbled across a zebra carcass. And after further examination, our guide decided to change our focus to finding some lions. He had recalled seeing a pride of lions earlier that week in the area, and seeing the zebra which had been killed recently, thought that those same lions could be in the area still.

We drove around, dead silent except for the sound of the jeep's engine, searching for any lions we could find. We circled around some of the shrubs where the lions could potentially be resting. But then we spotted a group of elephants, and although initially not thinking much about it, our guide noticed a very nuanced detail about one of the elephants. It was further away from the rest, and staring intently at something. It was still, almost like a statue, and had it's ears sticking out, meaning there was some danger. We drove over there, hoping to find a lion, when all of a sudden, the elephant starting chasing something. It was a lion and a lioness! It was chaos, with the elephant chasing the lions away, and my family hurriedly trying to catch up with the elephant.

Finally, the lions found a place away from the elephant to rest, where we could finally stop and snap some pictures!

(Look at those canines!)

We also spotted two more lionesses hiding insanely well in the shrubs!

We hung out with these gorgeous lions for quite some time and then went to hang out with some elephants that were grouped off to the side of the lions. Thankfully my camera was charged this time, so I was able to get some sweet pictures!

Then after a fullfilling few hours we headed back for lunch, where we recharged for our second outing of the day.

Thank you for reading today's post, I'll see you in the next one!