Those “one-way at a time” river crossings can get rather irritating, especially if there’s some tool who decides to stop for 5 minutes in the middle of the road and ignore others who are waiting, so I soon lost it and an hour later we were back at our unit so everybody could use the loo before our next mission.
We were sick of the H4-1, H1-2, etc and had enjoyed the previous day’s trip down to the Afsaal area, so that became the next plan. I had also cooked a pile of “minute” steaks the previous evening, so that I could stuff Albert’s face when the food nagging started, therefore we decided to purchase some buns, Prego sauce, etc at the shop and to picnic at Afsaal as it would be substantially cheaper than buying food there.
The H1-1 and H3 all the way to Afsaal produced a few of the usual gang but nothing to get excited about, so by the time we pulled into Afsaal I was seriously moaning about the lack of sightings and my lip was hanging on the steering wheel, but I suppose one can’t score all the time.
Our chow/picnic thing went off rather well and we will definitely do it again on future trips.
It was now nearly 11am and with full stomachs we were feeling rather lazy, however eventually we decided to do the S118 again and then to duck up the S114 to the Biyamiti Weir and then do the Biyamiti loop/S23/S113 back to the H3 and to call it a day once back in camp whatever time that may be.
At the S118/H3 intersection a small amount of motivation returned as a hyena popped up and some male lions were parking off in the bush just off the road.
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Around hallway down the S118 there’s a dead-end loop off the main dirt and we found 3 cars parked off in the loop and supposedly someone had seen a leopard briefly and now nobody could find it, so we also joined the search but gave up in 5 minutes and continued on.
Just around the corner a Kombi was stopped in the middle of the road and there was no way past so I got instantly irritated, however suddenly Hawkeyes started waving hands in the back seat like the Cow does and then she blurted out
“LEOPARD!”
“What, where………… *#%#.......... it’s right here”
This was actually a junior leopard, I’m guessing around 6 to 8 months old and he was in the V of a tree right next to the road and about 3m from us at just above eye level.
Hawkeyes took the 1st and 3rd pic below and Bushpig took the 2nd pick with their respective point and shoot cameras, so I’m shortly going to hand all photography over to the Rats.
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