Stop just one second… and ask yourself: have you already read the tales of the Kalahari days 1-2, day 3 and day 4? IF NOT YOU SHOULD START THERE. That is all.
Day 5: The quiet after the storm.
OK so we finally managed to get back to sleep after all the excitement when I woke up again and it was about 5am. I tried to let Van sleep (and snore) but eventually he cottoned on to my restlessness and woke up, so at 5:20am we decided to get up. We were pretty eager to try and find our three lions that had visited just a few hours earlier! This was the coldest morning yet – it must have been very close to zero because we were FREEZING while packing down the tent. Interestingly something seemed to have started building a little house on our toilet during the night – perhaps a little mouse or the mongoose family?
We were a little naughty and headed off a full 10-15 minutes early because it was freezing and we were ready and we had LIONS to find! Perhaps the Kalahari gods punished us for this transgression because there were no lions to be seen. In fact no predators of any sort, although Phokoje Pan was stunning at sunrise! We decided to check out Piper Pan and cook our breakfast there. The pans were gorgeous and full of plains game and some bat-eared foxes. The waterhole had no game other than some birds – it seems waterholes don’t see much action at this time of the year as we are yet to see anything of note at one! We drove around and checked out a number of pan loops but other than two giraffes running their little hearts out (why, we could not see), we didn’t find anything. Eventually we passed two cars and a guy in the first told us there were male lions ‘at the top pan’ and there had been females in the pan we just drove. Well, all we saw were some tracks, but no lions!
We cooked our breakfast (bacon and egg rolls again – yum) at Piper 1 and it was a pretty awesome campsite, with a decent view of the pan if you got yourself in the right position. On our way out we took the two roads we hadn’t yet been on in hope of seeing these mythical lions, but alas NOTHING. Feeling quite tired after an eventful but sleep-deprived night, we headed straight back to camp for a nap and a rest. Most unfortunately as we got to our campsite a 4×4 in front of us turned in there AND there was already another 4×4 there! This was most annoying, but as we pulled up the first car left and the second decided with the audience they would leave too – at least we had our campsite to ourselves once again.
After a quick nap and an attack from a couple of wasps who seemed intent on making their nest in our car, Van cooked us some chicken burgers for lunch. I have to admit it’s a bit disconcerting at times being out here in the day and not really knowing what to do with yourself. I can’t do much on my computer (like edit photos or watch anything) because the battery is a precious resource out here. There’s no electricity so you have to come with full camera and device battery power and try and make it last as long as possible. This is not typically my style, as I like to transfer all my photos of the day each evening to my hard drive and look through them. If there’s time I may even edit a couple of my favourites. But no, here I have only enough time to type up these accounts lest I end up with zero battery at the end and all the memories will disappear for good!
I did enjoy watching the resident mongoose family go about their business – they managed to find a bean that had somehow accidentally made it onto the ground and one of the young ones gleefully ran away with it. The mother was pretty keen to break into our rubbish bag, but sadly she couldn’t quite reach it. One of the youngsters was quite curious and kept coming close to me, but the other was completely skittish and ran at the slightest movement! I’m not sure which family was more entertaining – my natal spurfowls that I shared a shower with or these mongooses who were also so cute!
We ended up going on a short drive in the afternoon to check out pans on either side of our campsite but other than some bat-eared foxes and some plains game, there was nothing exciting to be found. Back to our campsite and we had everything set up and our spaghetti bolognaise dinner cooked, ready for us to eat it on our roof top watching the sunset. Bliss! Of course we were hoping for another show for our last evening at Phokoje campsite but it wasn’t to be, with no roaring to be heard the entire night. I tried some more night photography, had a hot chocolate and then it was bed time, before 8pm! Definitely in danger of being called a nanna. We both took half a phenergan to try and get some sleep, so who really knows if there was any roaring – there could have been a lion party at our campsite and we probably wouldn’t have woken up!
Day 6: when a cheetah ruins your gemsbok photo.
Thanks to the phenergan Van wanted to snooze when the alarm went off at 5:30am, so we didn’t get up until about 6:10am. At least the Kalahari gods wouldn’t be cranky with us today as we definitely weren’t going to leave before 6:30am! Thankfully it wasn’t sub zero temperatures like the previous day (though still cold), which made packing down a bit easier. We ended up leaving at about 6:45am, which wasn’t too bad. The sun had not yet risen, and I was hoping to get a picture of a gemsbok in front of the sunrise, but sadly this idea was ruined by a pesky cheetah that decided to ruin all plans by being in our field of vision. We at first thought it was a leopard but as it ran across the road it definitely appeared a lot more cheetah-like. I guess some of the animals are a bit more skittish around these parts because there are far fewer cars. I got one more look at our cheetah as it stopped for a moment in thick bush before continuing it’s trot away from us.
Yeah it was good to see a cheetah first thing but it was so quick there were no photos AND now the sun was too high for my amazing gemsbok photo of the YEAR. Thanks for nothing cheetah! We did stop at the plains and I took some OK photos of gemsbok in the sunrise, but the sun was too high and an annoying wildebeest wouldn’t get out of the shot! PHOTOGRAPHY FAIL (perhaps the title of my upcoming book about these last few months).
Onwards and the next stop was for a honey badger running along in the road in front, which I spotted as well – that made it 2 for 2 in the morning, despite both being on Van’s side or on the road (which is also his side given he is driving). The little honey badger ran and ran but it was almost impossible to get a good photo of him before he disappeared (like everything) into thick scrub. Still nice to see.
The rest of the morning was totally uneventful except for some very fresh male lion tracks that we followed into deception valley for quite some time. Despite our excitement there were no lions to be seen, and deception pan offered only a nice journey of giraffe. It was getting late (in the morning), so we headed to our campsite for that night, Kori 3, to cook some egg and bacon on toast. The campsite was lovely and HUGE but the toilet was even more unusable than our last. Bushes again!
There is a slight view to the pan here, which is lovely and so many gorgeous birds around! Somebody has made a couple of little bird baths using plastic bottles, and I filled one up and the birds are currently going NUTS for this water. Red-eyed bul buls, little black-faced waxbills, sparrow-weavers, fork-tailed drongos and more. Some birds are a bit greedier than others, but it’s fun to watch them all jostle for some water.
It’s midday and we are not sure what our plans are for the afternoon, but for now we will just hang out and maybe have a shower before it’s cold this evening!
Well, after lazing around a little and having our best shower yet, we decided to set out for an afternoon drive, even though we hadn’t really had much luck in the afternoons here. We drove up to Leopard Pan using the shorter road we hadn’t drove yet, and despite finding relatively fresh lion tracks (story of our lives), there were no predators to be seen. We did the leopard pan loop, which proved lovely but unproductive, and this was mirrored at Sunday Pan waterhole and the pan itself. Where all these lions that allegedly get seen at Sunday Pay every day of the year? We don’t know because we’ve been there now at least four times and seen zero lions! We did stop to enjoy the last of our spaghetti at Leopard Pan and it was almost as delicious the second time around.
We drove back to our camp at Kori, but just before we got there Van made a slight detour to drive up to the treeline towards Matswere gate, where we saw our lovely leopard on the first morning. Great thing that he did because what did we spot? Two cheetahs, stalking through the grass. Unfortunately they were a little far for good photos but we did watch them for the next hour and a half while they tried to hunt springbok on the pan. It was amazing to see how they could virtually disappear in the long grass, but sadly for them the springbok didn’t get quite close enough to that long grass and we eventually had to leave just as it seemed perhaps one of the springbok had spotted them and given the game away with their embarrassing alarm call.
We ended our game viewing the same way we started it – with cheetahs just a little too far away for photos, but nice to see nonetheless.
We got back to camp late to a couple of scrub hares hopping around our campsite. I do love our little animal visitors! Given we had our late lunch of spaghetti leftovers plus some in-car snacking, we decided we couldn’t be bothered to cook our butter chicken that had been on the menu for that evening. Instead we took the lazy route and cooked up some simple two minute noodles – I can claim to be the chef for once 🙂
After drinking some wine around the fire and looking through some of the videos we have recorded of our trip so far (selfie videos of us talking about exciting shit that happened), we retired to our roof top tent at about 8pm. I was hoping to hear some lions roaring but no such luck! With no phenergan I struggled to sleep once I woke up hot at 1am, so I was glad when the alarm went off.
And that was our second last day in the Kalahari!