Today I’m heading to Brandon to spend some time with my best friend Inge and her husband Michael. Inge was the person that convinced me to go on the African Safari and we’re going to be reminiscing about our trip! Catherine – the 4th member of our party, will be joining us on Monday evening for dinner. I can’t wait to talk about our trip!

Following are more photos taken on our first day Safari. Can you tell I love elephants? ;-D

Does this elephant know we’re watching??

On our way back to Spurwing Island after our first Game Drive – this is Catherine on the boat back.

One of the children living at the Game Warden’s compound in Matusadona National Game Park.

This is the Game Warden’s daughter – a bit shy at first – but she warmed to us!

The very elusive Lilac Breasted Roller in flight!

Elephant Trek…

A lone zebra – watching us – the lighting was unbelievable!

Another shot of an elephant – their trunks are so beautiful – graceful!

An elephant uses his feet to disturb the ground – looking for food? They eat trees, shrubs, grasses…

Did I mention how wonderful the light is?

A rare hippo on land – mostly they stay in the waters…

A great shot of a Water Buck standing in front of a termite mound.

While at Spurwing Island we woke up at 5:00 am to prepare for our first Game Drive of the day. This is the view that greeted us from our tent. Bliss…

Off to Brandon! I’ll post more another time.

I can’t believe it’s been almost a week since I’ve come back from my African safari!!!

What a trip! What an experience! I can’t describe it in words, so I’ll try to do it justice by posting images. I did take over 8000 images on this trip – so it is taking me a while to go through them all to pick my favorites.

My trip began on October 1st. First plane from Winnipeg to Montreal – then Montreal to Paris and from Paris to Johannesburg, South Africa. (In total I was on 13 planes!) From Johannesburg we flew to Harare, Zimbabwe and we boarded a 6 seater little plane to take us to our first destination – Spurwing Island, Karibe, Zimbabwe. This is a photo of the plane after dropping us off at Fothergill Airport.

Not much of an airstrip, is it?

It was about 41 degrees when we landed. Shortly after we landed, we were met by Jill – the manager of Spurwing Island Safari Lodge and one of her head guides, Sean.

We were immediately given refreshments (very welcome and very much required at this point) and taken on our first game drive! We went on quite a few game drives during our 3 night stay at the Safari Lodge – some were on Land rovers, one was a walking Safari and another one was by boat. These took place at 5:30 am and 3:30 pm – so we had the most gorgeous light for photographs – and also the time of day that the animals were most active! The game drives were probably my most favorite part of the entire trip!

The very first thing I noticed was the abundance of birds and we spotted this Fish Eagle perched at the top of a tree.

The next wildlife I saw was this animal. Difficult to see – but we spotted it!

We drove through Matusadona Game Park and the first large animals I saw was the elephant!

This is my first glimpse of what came to be my favorite animal in Africa!

But we were quite far away from them. Before we got to see them up close – we encountered some zebra. Beautiful animals as well!

We were getting closer to the elephants!

This is Sean, our Safari Guide. He was very knowledgeable and my favorite guide of the trip! Look at how close the elephants were to our Land Rover!

Then we got closer. Aren’t these images fabulous? The elephants are so large – but you can barely hear them when they move around. We saw many little baby elephants. Do you know how to tell the age of a baby elephant? It is less than one year old if it can fit under the belly of it’s mother!

Okay, so now you know – I love elephants!!! But not all photographs taken were of animals – the vegetation and land was breathtaking! The earth is a beautiful red color and Zimbabwe is such a beautiful country! I did photograph other things as well – this is one of my ‘artsy’ landscapes.

And these were all taken on our first Game Drive – before we ever got to our first destination!

Stay tuned – more to come….