Buffalo Soldier

I am alive after 12 hours of safari-ing.  From now on I’m going for witty blog post titles, but I have a fear that I may be sweating out all my wit and brainpower.  So, today we woke up a little before six, had breakfast, saw monkeys climbing on the roof of the lodge, and were on the road by 6:30. One of the first things we saw were a herd of 12 elephants (babies included).  Interesting fact I learned: elephants actually never forget.  They have such great memories that if they are ever injured by a person or people, they will come back and destroy that village for revenge.  Yikes.

Elephants on parade

The little (sort of) one!

One of my favorite animals we saw (besides cats, duh) were the dik diks, which look like small deer and are about knee-height.  They are one of the few species that mates for life.  So you always see them in pairs, prancing around.  They make me think of when a small tiny person marries another small tiny person and they make a small tiny couple and you know they will have small tiny children.  Adorable.

Other favorite animals (okay I realize I’m saying that about everything but…) are the monkeys.  It is so amazing to watch them because they are so human-like.  It’s the opposable thumbs that do it.  So when monkeys are really little, they hang on the their mother’s belly and ride like that as the mother walks.  Like an opposite side piggy back ride.  One of the baby monkeys that we saw doing that was basically a newborn.  When he was riding with his mother, we were all like ‘how cute.’  Then, when he hopped down, we realized how uncute super young monkeys are.  Big head, not much fur, huge ears.  Kinda looked like Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

Baby monkey looking like GollumThe actual Gollum

What I’m about to write is making me yawn already, but I’m going to do it anyways.  The whole thing about hippos yawning…isn’t exactly yawning, they are showing their huge teeth to each other as to intimidate one another. But it looks like yawning, because they open their mouths so wide and since yawning is contagious I’ve yawned 7 times while writing this.

I bet you yawned when you looked at this

The award for weirdest animal today goes to the mongoose.  They are not geese.  They look like ferret prairie dogs.  And when I say they run in packs, I mean they run in packs.  Legit, not one of them got more than a foot away from the others.  They looked like little CIA agents; one walking very slowly in one direction, getting up on its hind legs to look out, then darting back to the group.  And when a consensus was reached, they would all sprint away as a tight pack, so it looked like one blob of rippling fur.

And as per the blog title, we did see cape buffalo today.  Scary looking.  Their horns meet at the top of their head and the come down and out, almost like a Pippy Longstocking wig.  Not that the Pippy resemblance makes them any less scary.

Cape buffalo

See the resemblance?

We also saw giraffes necking (no, that does not mean kissing, literally necking).  Which means they were fighting by swinging their necks at each other.  Like fighters swinging right hooks, except in slow motion and with 6 foot necks.

Tomorrow we are off to the South Serengeti where there are…..wait for it……lots of cats!!  Meow