Day 8 Ruaha to Selous

Of course the day we are able to sleep in a little I am awake at 430.  Today we are having breakfast in camp, a beautiful sunrise again.  We will be going off to the airstrip around 9Am, and then 5 more nights in Selous.  We are all looking forward to a change of scenery, some new animals we haven’t seen yet, and what sounds like some beautiful lush scenery, it is still very dry in Ruaha, rain is badly needed, the only rain we saw was the first night we arrived.  Others we have met over our nights here in Ruaha came from Selous, they said it is very hot and humid there, that part I am not looking forward to. 

One last shot from our balcony

Entrance to tent 5

Loo with a view

View from the loo

Goodbyes from Ikuka camp

 

Last view of tents on top of hill

 

 

We were driven to the air strip by Lazaro who is wearing his Masai clothing today.  We were happy to meet up with our first guides from Mdonya who happened to be at the airstrip as well.  Lots of hugs all around, nice to see them one more time.  I did have a little fall on the way to the bathroom, just missed a funny shaped step, a few scratches, but nothing serious, hopefully my one and only fall this trip.

Our guide Lazaro seeing us off

Ron and I look very excited to get on another small plane

 

Say our goodbyes to Ruaha and we are a full plane minus 1 so we make a quick stop after one hour to pick up one more person, then a 5 minute flight to our stop in Selous.  Once again happy to get on the ground, I’m not the best in these small planes.

Flight from Ruaha to Selous

 

Our new guide Zackarias with his driver are here to greet us at the airstrip.  We are a little disappointed as it is bucket seats again, and we were hoping to have a bench like we had in our original camp, they are just easier to move around in, and more places to put our junk that we seem to bring along every trip. 

On our way to camp for lunch we see this guy having lunch, their necks are so short they have to kneel to eat

They have had some rain in Selous, roads are much worse here than Ruaha

First surprise is as we are driving we see a sign for the camp but we do not take that road, we travel another 5 minutes or so and find wild dogs sleeping under the trees.  Zack knew they were here earlier, so a very nice surprise for us to have them greeting us when we arrive.  It is supposed to be a pack of 9, but we can only find 8, one must be hiding somewhere. 

Pack of wild dogs right outside camp, our second dog siting this trip, so lucky!

 Arrive at our new camp and have lunch around 2PM.  Millie and Shaun are the camp managers here.  Sounds like they have been running camps for about 15 years.  We pretty much know the drill now, except this camp is a little different, they want you to have a Masai escort day and night when you move around, there is lots of animal activity here.

We also have choices here, we can do boat safaris as we are right on a lake, walking safaris, or the usually jeep safaris.  We opt for the boat safari this afternoon for a break from the jeep.  It is just the beginning of the wet season so the lake is still quite low, but what a nice change of scenery. Mostly it is looking at all the amazing water birds, hippos and crocs, we will for sure be doing this again early one morning.  I think Andre and Ron may have wanted to go see the dogs again this afternoon, but we're still hoping to find them again later in the week.

We do not have tents close to each other here, they needed to run electricity to one of the tents we were told for medical reasons so Andre and I have been moved to the end of the camp in the last tent.  We are so disappointed when we arrive at our tent, there are some very nice views of the lake from the main tent, and we have a view of 2 big bush, oh well we do not spend much time in tent anyway.  The tents themselves are pretty much identical to our first camp, except here they have a solar battery operated fan that we will find out soon that we will use every night.  One other difference is the sink at our first camp did not have a drain, you simply dumped the dirty water into a bucket, not exactly sure what they did with this bucket water, but we were told some kind of water conservation.  In this camp there is a drain for the sink.


The afternoon boat safari is fantastic.  Ayoub is our guide, and we are just the 4 of us on our boat, one other boat is out as well with 4 people.  We see so many new water birds, we especially love the king fishers.  The lake is still very low, they have had some rain here, but so much more is needed.  It is very different to be out on a boat in a lake with hippos and crocs all over the place, we're used to seeing these from the comfort of a jeep, very different from a small boat.

Lake Manze boat safari

Marabou Stork

African Spoonbill

Malachite Kingfisher, 14 cm high, so beautiful!

Pied Kingfisher

Yellow Billed Stork

Little Egret

Waterbuck

African Jacana

Yellow Billed Stork fishing together

Pink-backed Pelican

Yellow Billed Stork with a fish

Grey Heron



Cattle Egrets

Black-headed weaver

Sun setting with kingfishers

Black crowned night heron

Giant kingfisher - guide was excited to see this one, they have just started spotting him again recently

Hyena lurking about around camp

 

We have a nice supper under that stars tonight.  The camp is not quite full, but there are quite a few people here.  At this camp for dinner vegetables are served family style, then they come around with the mains and you are served by a waiter.   I also discovered a delicious ginger beer from South Africa called Tangawizi at the last camp on the last night, so I think I will be having one of these each night here as well, extra delicious with some rum added. Hyenas also visit during supper, the Masai use flashlights to shine in the bushes behind us during supper, not so sure I like my back facing the bushes at night.

Shaun also tells us we can move to a tent with a better view tomorrow if we like, we are very happy to hear this.  Nancy and Ron have a good view of the lake and have told us about the animals and birds they can see from their tent, we see two not so pretty bushes from ours.