Day two in the Serengeti...One Yellow Lion!

Day two in the Serengeti started out with seeing a leopard in a tree after we had only driven about 700 yards away from our tents!! Exciting!! We also saw a troop of baboons coming up a river bed and some that were just on the roadside. If looking at thee pictures makes you think we posted too many, we took almost 2,400 pictures in a five day period and it was a photographers dream. Since none of us are professional photographers, we did the best we could and picked out the ones we thought we blog worthy, 62 of them for this small section of our day. You have to keep in mind that we saw all these animals in the time it took us to leave our camp around 8:30a.m. and to arrive the other side of the Serengeti about 4 hours later. We spent the balance of the day visiting a Masaai village and another stop at a museum out in the middle of nowhere that is the site where the first signs of homo-erectus and homo-sapiens were found. Those photos will be the next posting.
This day was filled with lions, hippos, zebra, gazelle, wildebeests (gnu), mongoose, lions, leopards, giraffe, ostrich, warthogs, and the unbelievable sight of those thousands of animals in herds. Someone asked us when we returned if we saw a "crossing". That means, did the animals run in front of your vehicle. Well, the answer is WE were the crossing! They were constantly crossing. You can see in the photos that all kinds of animals were crossing and we were right in the middle of it all.
The zebra and the gnu. They are buddies. They hang out together and they protect each other. Some lay down and rest while the others stand as lookouts for predators. The zebra can stand in groups of three and rest their heads on each others backs and rest that way while standing. Very cool. If one gnu gets spooked, it causes thousands of zebra, gazelle, and gnu to start running off into the horizon as far as you can see. They were in this are of the Serengeti resting and eating. There was no wide river here for them to cross to see a big croc come up and snatch an unsuspecting gnu. Although, that is what Nicky wanted to see! Too bad. He will have to see it on National Geographic. To say we saw all there was to see may be a lie, but not really. We saw all we could ever hope to see and more. It was like a show. All the thousands and we aren't talking a few thousand, we are talking hundreds of thousands of animals were all around us. It was the great migration we had traveled so far to see. It was better than wonderful. It was surreal. A trip to this part of the world is hard to get to for sure. Worth it? No question. This will be a day we will love to remember forever.
The odd photos of the flat tire. A couple of missionaries for The Salvation Army had a flat tire out in the middle of nowhere and our guide gave him one of our spare tires! We served as AAA in the Serengeti!