THURSDAY 7TH JUNE

If you think what I saw till wednesday was exciting... wait till you hear about what happened on Thursday!!!

Thursday, post breakfast was an uneventful 2 hour drive to Sweet Water Tented camps. As the name says, the rooms are actually tented camps! Large green tents that reminded my mom of M*A*S*H, and once you enter is a completed different world of comfortably beds, dressers and hot showers. These rooms have no doors or locks and just have to be zipped down as you leave. Overlooking our tents here, was another watre hole, where we saw plenty of giraffes stopping for a drink, and also a few doing stretches early in the morning. For those who haven't seen giraffes on National Geographic, they are so tall that they have to stretch to a very uncomfortable position to bend down enough and drink water. Its a rare sight to see them in this pose and for a couple of hours after lunch that I spent outside the tent reading a book, this was my backdrop.

Our evening game drive from 4-6 p.m. was quite uneventful ( in that we saw tons of deer and boars and buffalos but as I said, that was no longer such a big deal for us! :))

The speciality of this particular hotel ( other than its cleverly designed rooms) is the night safari they have from 7-9 p.m. or 9-11 p.m. They also have a lion tracking from 6:30 a.m. - 9 a.m. We decided to go for the night trail and then depending on what we saw, maybe we'd track lions in the morning and watch them hunt.

The most eventful part of the journey so far has been the night safari... We told the driver and the spotter ( the night safari had another guy sitting in front with a very powerful lamp trying to identify the animals) that we'd seen all the animals at Masai Mara, and tha the only thing remaining was to see a kill. He promised to do his beast and took us around. After about a half an hour of scouting around, we spotted a hyena running with a limb of some animal, we guessed there must be a chase or a kill somewhere closeby. But it wasn't as I assumed. This was froma kill probably many hours ago by a cheetah or a lion. When we searched, we couldn't find anything close by.
But these drivers are so well tuned with the wild, that they know all possible places where the king of the jungle sleeps. We stumbled onto a pride of lions just preparing for bed... not just a few of them.. a grand total of TWENTY!!! Four lions... about eight cubs and the rest lionesses. Our driver informed the rest of the cars as well... to come and take a look at this magnificent pride. Disturbed by all the lights shone on them, they all tried to move away into the trees and away from the unwelcome visitors. But we refused to give up that quickly! We followed them and took photos and videos, from every possible angle. When we were all watching the cubs stretching on a tree, I turned around and got a shock of my life! Just a foot away, to my left, the lion had gotten up and slowly was making its way into the jungle. I was so startled... I almost jumped out of the car!