Night Drives

Another awesome part about our trip to the Naboisho conservancy last week (see last post) was getting to go on NIGHT game drives through the bush.  This was one of the sweetest/freakiest/amazing-est things that I've done in a while.  We hooked up two big spotlights to the car, and someone would take each of them and sit on the windowsills or stand out of the sunroof, scanning side to side and looking for eyes.  Yep, the way you spot animals at night is by picking out the reflections from their eyes through the bush - that's where the FREAKY part came in.  We'd be driving along and then, way off in the distance, see two glowing greenish or reddish dots kinda like this...

Then, we would head off through the bush in that direction, and if we were lucky, our spotlight would show us that the crazy eyes belonged to something like this guy:

Talk about a humbling feeling.  Sitting in the stillness of the night, with absolute blackness pushing in from all sides except for in the two small circles lit up by the spotlights, and with a four hundred pound male lion looking directly at you.  You also know that there are at least ten or twelve other lions in the area, but you've only spotted four.  They could be creeping up right behind you...

AWESOME!  It was absolutely exhilarating. The whole experience was made even more magical by the fact that the skies were full of more stars than I could ever count, with the bright cloud of the milky way cutting a line across the blackness.  What a great way to spend an evening...