If you are just joining the adventure, we are exploring the wonders of South Africa with Adventures by Disney and we invite you to catch up on all you have missed here.
Today was a very long but amazing day. However, due to the late hour, I will be showing off a lot of photos of the animals from today and just highlighting some of the best points. Before we get on to our first game drive, I wanted to touch on something I talked about yesterday, the lioness on the lodge property. It was found these four lionesses were able to gain access to the lodge property through a drainage area and attacked the male nyala I had a picture of yesterday. The attack was very close to the guest area but the amazing staff at the River Lodge had the situation taken care of very quickly. While I didn’t get to see any of the lionesses or the attack, today we did get to see “the scene of the crime” where, if you look closely at the tree, you can see some of the nyala blood.
But enough about the Circle of Life antics of yesterday, it is on to the reason we have flown halfway across the world…a game drive!
Morning Game Drive
With almost 50 of us on the special Adventures by Disney tour, we were split up between a few different game vehicles that we would have for the rest of our time. Our jeep, Team Timon, had ranger Rassie, the driver and talker, and tracker Collen, the true eyes of the game vehicle. After spending most of the day with them, I’ve found that they are two incredible people and very entertaining, Over our 2+ hours out on the game reserve, we saw and learned many of the inhabitants, which if I were to go into detail, would take many many days. So instead, here is a gallery of our morning drive and, if you want to what you are looking at, please post a comment and we will try and help.
After seeing so many animals in the wild, it was back to the lodge to see some of the unclose type of animals.
Snakes and Insects Up-Close
This presentation was amazing, not only with some of the beautiful snakes of South Africa but also a true chance to learn about how these animals help the world and how we should help them by letting them be (in other words, not rushing to kill all snakes or bugs). Once we had learned about some of the most amazing reptiles, we had a chance for a Fireside Chat with Joe and Mark. Incidentally, one of the other people on the tour teased me after by calling it a “chat with Joe and Jeremiah” because I was the first to ask a question that Joe then went on to answer for about for about 30 minutes. But I will delve into at a later date, because really the highlight of the day was next.
Evening Game Drive
The above photo, as with all photos from this trip, are taken by me and not a publicity set up photo. So YES the rhinos really did get that close to a game vehicle just like we had a baby elephant walk right by ours in the morning. Here are many more of what we saw during our afternoon/early evening drive.
Dinner
Now, it is very hard to top a day of game drives in South Africa — seeing baby elephants and zebras or a young lion almost getting up enough nerve to go after some rhinos (but turning and running at the last second) — but seeing Dr. Mark and Joe singing “The Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show really did just that. The dinner this evening was indeed in the bush with amazing atmosphere and food and then to hear two of the men responsible for Disney’s Animal Kingdom being the amazing park it is today just singing songs and having a great time drove home how lucky we all were to be there in that moment!
Well, that does it for today, now to catch a few hours of sleep before our early morning wake up call for the morning game ride.