Tanzania Day 9: It's the Final Cat-down!

Since it was our last full day on safari, we opted to revert back to our original schedule so we were on the vehicle at 6:30a. It was cold as usual.

Flock of egrets

Waterbuck

Behind the waterbuck, our guides spotted roan antelope. These are pretty uncommon and this was a first sighting for me so very exciting.

About ten minutes later, we finally saw a couple of lionesses walking in the tall grass off in the distance. These were the first and only lions we would see in Katavi, a park known for its large lion packs. You can barely see the top of her back in the tall grass.

We stopped for breakfast and while eating our eggs, we found some eggs.

Back on the road.

We visited a new hippo pool. The male was standing guard over his hippo harem.

Our guides got out of the vehicle to do something although I couldn't figure out what.

Suddenly the head hippo had a challenger.

We were parked only a few yards away and thought we were about to have front row seats for a heavyweight hippo fight.

There was a lot of posturing but finally the errant hippo walked away.

He went off by himself to pout. I felt kind of sorry for him being run out of the hippo pool.

On our way out, we ran into some elephants crossing the road.

We returned to camp for lunch and this time, caught our bushbuck's girlfriend. It seems she was shacking up under our banda with him.

We had our lunch, with dessert, of course.

After a couple hours of rest, we were back out for our final game drive of the trip. It was the usual suspects at first.

And then we stumbled upon a leopard and his nap time. We were able to drive right up under the tree and he didn't care at all.

Brenda really wanted to see a leopard on this trip so we found it just in time. We closed the evening out with more hippos.

Kevin, our driver

Brenda doing her own version of hippo.

We returned to camp and our last dinner was similar to our first.

We were off to bed to rest up for the next part of our African adventure.