Having survived the medium length walk we decided to go for
the long walk today so started an hour earlier at 6.15 am. Before long we found ourselves following the
track of a group of elephants, Kingsley, our ranger believed they had passed through
a couple of hours previously. However,
after about an hour, Kingsley suddenly stopped us and pointed in the
distance. We couldn’t see anything but
Kingsley rapidly pushed us back up the track we had come down. He had seen and heard a group of elephants. We knew he was concerned when he charged his
rifle but it was only later that he told us that there were two groups of
elephants and we were directly in between them!!
The walk continued to the river where we met three other
rangers on patrol at their mobile camp. At this pointed we started to head back to camp
but the walk suddenly got even more exciting.
On the other side of the river Kingsley had spotted a couple of
poachers. He asked if we were OK with
him firing a couple of shots to scare them off.
As we stayed hidden in the bushes he darted out into the open and
started firing (it was like watching a scene from a war movie). In the end he fired
eight shots as there were actually six poachers – luckily they were not armed
and they legged it into the bush. We
spent the next half hour helping Kingsley destroy a huge fishing net made of mosquito netting that they
were using to catch fish.
Kingsley then
went off in search of their camp and returned with a wire snare.
He also decided to set fire to their plastic
bucket along with half the bush – we assume he was aiming to scare them off even further and
the rapidity that the grass on the bank went up certainly scared us. As we wandered back to the camp we were
suddenly met by the 3 rangers we had bumped into earlier – they had been
concerned that we had encountered elephants so were on their way to rescue
us!! We eventually made it back to camp
at 11.45 – it had certainly been an exciting walk!!
We spent the rest of the day relaxing and decided to eat at
the lodge instead of cooking – the food was superb.
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