5:30 wakeup call with tea and coffee delivered to our tent and warm water in a jug in the head for washing up. Very VIP. A quick muffin and travel mugs filled with coffee to go and we are on in the truck by 6:04, well in advance of the sunrise. This is safari!

We go around to the far side of the lagoon in front on the camp to look for signs of the warthog kill from the night before. James has some sweet new night vision binoculars that we all get to look through. Looks exactly like Predator😂. We are just sitting, no engine, in the dark, listening. Paying attention to what nature is telling us. Lions roaring to the northeast. We head off. Travel for about 5 minutes then James stops the truck, kills the engine. We wait. James says “on average lions will roar every 7 minutes, but keep it to a minimum”. We hear lions roar. James starts the truck and we drive for a short while and kablam, two male lions within 30 minutes of starting off without any radio assist from other guides. We are very alone out here, not having seen another vehicle since James picked us up aside from a support truck that was delivering our lunch. This is safari!

It is still before sunrise. The male lions are just starting to stir. Nuzzling up against each other. Then start walking their territorial line retro-minging urination on bushes (i.e. “marking their territory”) as they go. Periodically James repositions the vehicle so that we are well ahead of them, with the rising sun to our back to make sure that we can get excellent pictures with the golden light of sunrise. Amazing.

We follow and watch them for an hour. Observing their marking, patrolling, sniffing, and interacting with each other. Great to see lions up and about versus just laying around which is what you normally get when you don’t get out early. This is safari.

Breakfast time. James does a thorough sweep with the car of a nearby area looking for the lioness that he’s been seeing tracks of before parking in the middle of an open field with a lagoon filled with lechwes and hippos with elephants in the distance. Breakfast is DIY avocado toast, yogurt and various toppings, and hard boiled eggs with tea or coffee.

After breakfast we cruise around, looking for lions, leopards, etc. Plenty of lioness signs, but looks like they’ve traveled across an inaccessible part of a marsh. Signs of a leopard dragging a kill up into the bush. James gets out of the truck and walks into the bush for a while, comes back to report he didn’t find any definitive answer to the tracks. Lots of excellent birds.

Back at camp we have a delicious lunch: beet, carrot, and feta salad, green salad, focaccia bread, and hake fish with an onion sauce. We hear a bit about how Botswana government has a desired to increase their food independence as a nation so have instituted several waves of bans on external produce without having sufficient farm capacity domestically to compensate. This means that there is a very healthy vegetable black market, mostly coming in from Zimbabwe, and so not all of our food this trip is strictly legal… The afternoon heat is vicious today, we take refuge in our tent wearing dampened kikois (think sarong) while a fan blows on us from the foot of the bed – bush AC. At 3:30 we get shower water hoisted for us, bathe, and meet at the central tent for fresh squeezed lemonade, sausage rolls, and bananas foster cake. We think they might be bulking us up to feed to the wildlife.

We do a bit of a night drive on the way back to camp. Not a ton of unusual animal activity but we do see our first cape hare and spring hare ever. There are definitely things you just can’t see when the sun is up. On the way back to the lodge we run over a log of no particular prominence after which each rotation of the left rear tire makes a puffing sound, like a very quiet locomotive. James will deal with that puncture later. Surprise dinner guests are an explosion of midges (tiny black flies) that are everywhere and swarming anything producing light. Fortunately they aren’t biting, but we do end up basically eating our gourmet meal by moon light, only briefly turning on a torch to appreciate the beautifully prepared dishes. Butternut squash soup (with a bit of a zing this time), chicken ballentine, peas, sweet potato tart, roasted beets, and profiteroles for dessert. A scotch nightcap by the mopani fire staring at the vivid milky way in the sky. This is safari.