OUR FIRST DAY OFF!!! We’re pretty hard workers here in the CWB team, we only have one day off over the 2 weeks and today is it. I was expecting lying in, being fanned cool by attractive hotel staff and sipping Magners Cider by the pool before putting on some glad rags and hitting the clubs in the evening with the new aftershave purchased at a quaint market stall in the afternoon.
But no, alarms set for 5.30am, on the bus at 6am and sat in a National Park car park at 6.30am. Oh yes, today’s early start was going to be worth it for a safari; the first time for most of us. We sat in the car park with some buffalo and monkeys, we had 4 cameras on board the bus and before we’d even got in to the National Park I think we’d taken over 100 photos, I don’t envy the poor guy that has to go through all of them…oh, right, d’oh.
So off we go on the bumpy road in our familiar bus and before you know it we’ve seen quite a lot. The landscape changes quite dramatically quite quickly as one second we’re hidden within a jungle-like world and 5 minutes later we’re exposed out in the open with herds of animals migrating around us. Fortunately I had discovered beforehand that our bus was indeed “Lion Proof”.
We headed up high to a viewing area, an absolutely incredible experience. To be able to see such a vast landscape was breathtaking, a herd of Buffalo running in to the lake beneath us, 1 sun in the sky with another reflecting off the same glassy water. I’m not much of a linguist, but when we get the photos up you’ll see what I mean.
Obviously what we all wanted to see was a Lion (preferably killing something of course) but our loyal driver Linc told us that we probably wouldn’t see them, that we would need to be lucky and they were very hard to find. We’d been on the bus for 2 minutes from the viewing area and almost drove past one sat literally on the side of the road!! So much for Linc’s wisdom, the bus overcome with frenzied excitement to get a look. Our luck was still holding when another Lion came to join him, strike a few noble poses before allowing us to follow them as they walked away. I’m not sure about their reputation, but they looked awfully fluffy & cute to me.
The rest of the safari struggled to match that high, andwith such an early start I admit I was one of a couple that slept for a lot of it! We got back to our hotel before lunch and had some time to prepare ourselves before the big cricket match against David’s local team of promising Kenyans:
We batted first and Deeps & myself got us off to a good start against some short bowling, Deeps playing the ball with his nose down to fine leg for some good runs. The innings lost a little bit of puff as Nish got out (minus 5 runs) every time he hit a boundary, and Tim tried to protect his average from the non-strikers end. The experience of Rich came through at the end with a few late boundaries, but we didn’t really believe that our total of 65 off 8 overs would be enough.
Sure enough it wasn’t as we decided to serve up plenty of full toss pies which were despatched for boundaries. Once again credit to Deeps who tried to claw us back in to it with 2 wickets in an over, and Mac who held on to a couple of catches. Much credit to Mac actually who put in a very good performance on her debut in the game having only had a couple of quick lessons.
Handshakes all around at the end of the game and those that wanted to carry on playing (most of us) did just that until the sun started to set.
