Weddings, Wombats and Hippos (Part 1)

After more years than you can poke a stick at, the day has finally arrived when my mate of nearly 30 years is finally going to tie the knot. But more about that a little later!

As the wedding party boys were to spend the morning polishing up on their speeches, shoes and faces, a few of us took the mini bus on a self guided tour of Tala to see what animals we could find in the light of day. Armed with a list of resident animals (which didn't help so much as there were no accompanying pictures) we hit the trails. We made our way back to the hippo lake to get a closer look at these fascinating creatures. On the way we saw a myriad of animals. Burchell's Zebra, they have brown as well as black stripes (or are they white stripes???), Wildebeest, Eland (a type of antelope), Kudu (another type of antelope), Impala (yet another type of antelope), Blesbok (and again!), Nyala (yep you guessed it - another antelope!) and a family of Warthogs (the babies are defiantly much cuter than their parents!!)

Down at the hippo hide, we got our first up close sighting of hippos. Initially they were a little way off but over time, a couple began to make their way over towards us. I don't know if it was natural curiosity or whether they were attracted to Mad Matt's attempts to call them over and were trying to size him up to get a piece of him (no offence Matt!!). Whatever the reason, we got a few spectacular hippo yawns ( a sign of aggression we learnt later) which was great stuff, topped off by the sighting of a heard of Rhino in the background!!

Conscious that we had a wedding to get to in the afternoon and with us all agreeing that it would be poor form to arrive after the bride, we started to head back to the lodge. We were disappointed that we had not yet seen any giraffes however at the very last turnoff back to the lodge, we spotted a heard not to far off!! We were all extremely excited to see such majestic creatures grazing amongst the trees and it was just like the scene from a David Attenborough documentary as we approached them. It was unbelievable how close we ended up getting to them.

If this is what the morning delivered up for us, the afternoon's wedding was going to be something else!!