Tanzania safari report - Day 11

So where is the rain? We haven't seen it in around 3 days, so I anticipate some dust if we don't see rain in the next few days. That is completely ok with me, as I enjoy photographing running animals in dust clouds. It adds another element to a scene and helps illustrate a story. The more eye candy you can put into a scene, better the photograph.

We left camp around 6:30am, in pursuit of a lion that we heard throughout the night. His roars echoed through our tents as we drifted off to sleep last night, and during breakfast you could see the smiles on faces in anticipation finding him this morning. We didn't find him, but we did find a magnificent martial eagle who was feasting on a bustard in a tree. Talk about predation! It made some people excited and others a tad grossed out. Life on the plains is all about sex and violence, I must say. It is part of a natural cycle out here.

Since we had such a fantastic hippo-fest a few days ago, I thought it would be a good idea to return to Retima. This is a good opportunity to show exposure techniques as well as configure people's cameras to use the autofocusbutton on the rear of their cameras. Most cameras made in the past few years have this button enabled, however it has little benefit until you disable the autofocus functionality on the shutter button. This is a good reminder for me to post a specific blog entry on the subject at a later date.

On our slow drive back to camp, we saw an all out war between bachelor impalas and an alpha male. All females there part of the harem stood and watched, as they were obviously waiting to see who the victor was.

After lunch we headed out in the later afternoon, and found a lioness on a dead tree in great light. It was the same tree as a few das ago, however this time the lioness was not collared. This was a very good thing. 3 other lions were close by, however they were in the low branches of a very green sausage tree.

Kileo and I stopped by the airstrip to intercept my 'lost' duffle bag, so I now have clean clothes and my digital projector! Woohoo. We stopped at a nice landscape shot for a big umbrella acacia tree with beautiful clouds over the Rongai hills in the background.

Back to camp and time for a nice shower.....