Safari Day 9 - Serengeti!

On our first full day in the Serengeti we would make a morning and an afternoon game drive.  In the morning we ran into a really great elephant encounter.  This elephant was eating food right bythe road so we stopped for a while and watched and listened to the crunching of the thorny trees that the elephants seem to like.  It's particularly cool how dexterous their trunks are.

After this, we headed out of the trees and into the endless plains that give the Serengeti its name.  In this park (and area) the Wildebeest make a gigantic clockwise migration and they were currently staying close to Kusini camp.  We ran into endless herds and concluded that we had seen more of them than any other animal we've ever seen (cows in the US being the runner up).   One wildebeest alone isn't very exciting but thousands of wildebeest are spectacular to see running/fighting/eating on the plain.

In the afternoon, we headed back out and Dad spotted a leopard on our drive back into the plains less than five minutes from camp.  This was our second leopard in less than a week which is pretty good for safari groups (some don't see any) so we were pretty excited even if we didn't get any good pictures.  

Our drive headed out to the Simba Rocks where we ran into the resident lion pride.  We saw a lot of lions on the trip but every time they were doing something a little different.  This day the lion cubs were out and about playing and inspecting us.  The only correct word to describe these future killers is... adorable.

We had a great sunset on our ride back to a delicious dinner at camp.  The Serengeti had lived up to its reputation!