Olare Motogorgi Conservancy: Day 4

Olare Motogorgi Conservancy

Day 4 : Thursday. 13^th December 2018

Today's Maps

Balloon ride

 Afternoon Game Drive

I know I say early start a lot but today really was, as it was a 4:15am wake up for a 4:30 coffee & tea then a 5am pickup, followed by a 1 hour drive in the dark to the balloon launch site.

To make matters worse Lisa was a bit under the weather, she got up and headed for the porcelain bus, and lets say she drove that bus for a while. Now I hear a lot of people saying how terrible, but rest assured I did bring her tea in bed.

On the drive out we had barely left the campsite when we nearly got bogged, James our driver for the day was a little unhappy, but we got out of the mud relatively easily in the end, just a little bit of wheel spinning. At 5ish in the morning there isn’t much to see, we crossed the river a few times but driving in the dark limits what you can see. Having said that last nights rain made it a bit more fun as we got to slide around a bit, but I was glad the rain was gone because we wouldn’t be getting off the ground if it was still about.

We arrived in time to watch the balloon get inflated, its hard to imagine the scale of them until you get to see them up close. These balloons are rated to take up to 16 people plus the pilot, so they are big. 

I got a spot next to the pilot which was not the original plan, I wanted to be on the corner so I could see in two different directions. However, I think it turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the pilot and I chatted about a book that I read which he has also read. It’s a true story of a balloon crossing from Zanzibar to the mainland and which inevitably lead to ballooning in East Africa.

From the balloon you get a vastly different perspective then you do from a vehicle, we got to see Giraffe, 4 lions and the possible location of a leopard.

From the air you could also see where they had done some controlled burns, where the burn off had taken place the grass was now green whereas the areas that had not been subjected to the burn offs were dried brown grass. There are pluses and minus’s to burning off, the main reason it’s now needed is that animals like rhinos are no longer around to eat the grass.

From the balloon the landscape views are just spectacular, because of cloud cover we could see parts of the Rift walls, but we also got to see the other balloons in flight behind us, just brilliant.

Once we landed we drove to our breakfast site where the Champagne Breakfast was ready to go.

Lisa still wasn’t feeling the best so she used the Loo with a view and had a chat with god via the porcelain telephone.

During breakfast I had some more interesting conversations with pilot, it turns out if you take off from the Kenyan side of the Great Rift Valley and happen to miscalculate your landing and end up in Tanzania, it’s a bad thing. We also got to chat about ballooning in Turkey, (one of my bucket list things) the basic message was research, research, research.

After breakfast I asked James our driver for the morning if we could go back to the site of the leopard. It turns out that when you are in the actual Mara it’s a bit of a free for all. We got to see the leopard perfectly, but there were about 20 vehicles jostling for position around us. and on the way out from where we saw the leopard there was a small creek crossing and there were another 12 vehicles waiting to cross to get a view of that elusive leopard. I filmed it on the GoPro but that stupid device didn’t work.

For me this showed the difference between the conservancys and the actual Mara, in the conservancy we would be lucky if we saw 3 other vehicles on the game drive.

From there we basically made our way back to the Lion camp for a well earned rest…at 1pm lunch was served and we were reunited with Sarah.

After lunch Lisa had another nap whilst I worked on downloading photos, etc. it turns out I average about 1000 photos per day.

At 3:45pm afternoon tea was served followed by our 4pm game drive. Sarah said she would like to see some cheetahs as they are her favourite animal, so the search began. We probably spent 30 minutes looking but when John spotted them it was something special.

There was a mother and 4 cubs, the mother had got a baby impala and the cubs were basically playing with it. The best way I can describe it was like a house cat when it catches a mouse, it just plays with it until it’s had enough or the mouse gets away. On this occasion the baby impala didn’t get away, it was hard to watch at times because of the impala’s crying but it was something that people rarely get to see. Effectively the mother was teaching her cubs how to hunt. They would bat the impala around a bit, and let it run away, but they always caught it again easily.

Because Sarah, Lisa and I were happy to just sit around and watch the cheetahs and the other Canadians were not, William arranged another vehicle for them. (they had their 10 photos). From where I sit, if you’re always off searching for the next big thing then you will probably miss something spectacular and you will always be moving from one thing to the next.

We watched the cheetahs until just after they killed the baby impala, (all up about 2 hours) then we found 16 lions having a nap in the grass. The thing about lions is they sleep a lot during the day and are almost invisible when they are lying down, when they sit up we could see their ear markings. At first we thought that there were only a few around but they just kept appearing.

As the sun started to fall the lions started to stretch and move, they all started to gather in one spot so William moved the vehicle closer so we could get a better look. One of the lions decided to stretch out and claw the tyre cover on the back of the vehicle. We were so enthralled with them we decided to have our sundowner with them.

We then headed back for dinner, all in all it was a great days game viewing.