We had elephants in the camp in the morning!  I could hear them making noise and crashing about nearby, but I couldn't see them early.  They were right next to Patty and Rob's tent!  They came about quarter to five in the morning, and Patty and Rob watched them for over an hour and a half.  First a big bull came, and was eating just a few feet from their tent.  Then a second one approached, and the first one gave a long low growl as if to say, "Go eat somewhere else", so the second one backed off and and went to eat beside Mary and Liza’s tent.  Patty said the big bull breathed like Darth Vader, and that lying on her bed watching this elephant 8 feet away, separated by nothing but mosquito netting was unbelievably thrilling.  Patty and Rob both cite this early morning close encounter as the single most exciting moment of their whole trip.  Dominique (as the elephant was later identified by Sal) would take hold of a Doum palm with his trunk, using his whole body for leverage, and shake the tree to knock the fruit down, and then eat it.  He pooped and peed in the path between the tents (Rob said it sounded like Niagara Falls!), we immortalized that with a photo.  Later, we watched him wade across the lake to the other shore. 

     Patty and Rob also saw a Bushbaby.  They are nocturnal, so although we had heard them in the trees at night several times, we did not expect to see them.  Patty and Rob glimpsed this one, however, because it must have gotten trapped away from its daytime sleeping place by the elephant, who was there before dawn, and it had to wait for the elephant to leave before it could go to its home. 

          We had talked the management into letting us get an early start this morning for our game drive and take a boxed breakfast with us.  We had a wonderful warthog viewing right away, our best to date.  There were two of them, on their knees grazing, and for some reason they did not run away when we approached like they usually do.  Like most of the Selous animals, they were larger and fatter than their Serengeti counterparts.  They use their shovel-like snouts to dig up the roots of the grass to eat, and being on their knees gives them the right leverage to reach the ground without tiring. 

     A red-billed oxpecker was on the back of one of the warthogs, picking at bugs.  It would hop all over his back and head, even sitting on his snout.  At one point, the warthog tossed his head up, and the bird flipped from his snout back to his rump again! 

     We saw a Red-billed Francolin, similar to the spurfowl.  We had a good view of some Cape buffaloes.  We saw, again, a number of the beautiful brightly colored carmine bee-eaters and Eurasian rollerbirds.

     We stopped for breakfast beneath a huge Baobab tree.  These trees are stunningly beautiful, with their enormous trunks.  This one was about thirty feet in diameter, and Kimaro said it was around a thousand years old.  Many of the trees seemed to be hollow, Mom said that they looked like the trees ‘‘those elves that make the cookies live in.’’  She was right, they looked just like the trees of the Keebler Elves!

     We had a wonderful breakfast, Kimaro had brought a table and chairs!  We had the delicious hard-boiled eggs that we had enjoyed with all our box breakfasts, and we had perhaps the best bread we had ever tasted! 

     After breakfast, we saw a group of elands, this was the best look we had of them, as they are very shy.  They have a large hump at the withers, a little like a Brahma bull.  The male was darker than the females.  They have thin white brindle stripes around their withers.  At one point, we saw elands, giraffes, zebras and wildebeests all running together in one herd. 

     We saw three more lions, two females with a half-grown cub.  This brought our count up to 85 different lions we had seen on this trip, 73 in the Serengeti and 12 in the Selous.

A male lion.

     For our new species of the day, we saw a Yellow Weaverbird.  It was bright yellow all over.  This kept our streak perfect, we saw at least one new species we hadn't seen before on every single game drive or boat ride the whole trip. 

     We passed three ground hornbills, Patty gave her hornbill call (willa willa) to get them to pose for the picture!  We also saw a lone hyena, the only one we had seen in the Selous. 

     On the way back, we came across ten elephants playing in the edge of the lake beneath the lovely symmetrical Doum palm trees.  There were two small babies, they played and rolled in the mud.   It was one of the nicest elephant encounters we had. 

     Sadly, we ended our last game drive of the trip, and went to pack before lunch. 

      We said goodbye to Kimaro and Sal, and everyone at Mbyuni, and left for the airstrip to fly to Dar.  Our jeep made one trip around the airstrip to chase the animals off of it before the plane came in. 

     We flew into the domestic terminal at Dar es Salaam, and had to transfer by taxi to the International terminal.  That was a nightmare, with about twenty taxi drivers aggressively vying for our business.  It was a lot like the vultures in a feeding frenzy; unfortunately we were the dead zebra.  They tried to shove us in their taxis and get us to hire them, we were terrified that we would get separated from our luggage or each other!  After a little screaming, which bordered on the hysterical, and a flat refusal to pay $10 for a 2 block taxi ride, we eventually managed to get all of our luggage and all of our people into three taxis without losing anything or anybody.  We arrived at the International terminal, only to find that we were not allowed into the terminal for another two hours.  We had to sit outside in the heat, guarding our luggage and fending off fanatics trying to sell us rocks, until two hours before our flight.  One fanatic became so inflamed when we refused to buy his ‘magic rocks’ that he put a curse on us.  Eventually we were able to go into the terminal, which, not being air-conditioned, was just as hot as the tarmac outside.  We did a little shopping, and finally got on the British Air flight heading for London. 

     After all the time in Africa, avoiding drinking the water and taking Pepto-Bismal three times a day to avoid getting sick, I managed to get sick on the plane on the way home from eating British Air food, I should have known better! 

     Our trip to Africa was incredibly awesome, truly the trip of a lifetime.  It is an experience we will always carry with us, it has become a part of us.  I feel I am a different person for having been there.   

We want to go back!  We want to go back!  WE WANT TO GO BACK!!!