Up at 5.00am - after a great night's sleep at last! Breakfast overlooking lake and the sky was glowing with the light of the soon to emerge sun making a spectacular entrance to start the day. Watched by darters, black headed weavers and hippos.
As we waited for our driver Ross's Turaco visited the fruiting trees along with vervet monkeys.
We headed of to the park HQ to collect our guide for the next two days - a tall young Rwandan named Briscoe.
We went from lake shore to the top of the rolling hills, where we could see, in the east, a house in Tanzania and from thick woodland and thickets to marshy swamp and high grassy plains - Akagera's 112,000 hectares harbour a wide range of habitats.
Indeed it was once 3x its current size but the government gave two thirds to local communities when they returned from an earlier genocide.
Our first big sighting was of an enormous bull elephant - who was not to be trifled with as he had lifted a safari vehicle with guides under training in it off the road and into the bushes - we saw the pictures to prove it ! This did not however worry a cattle egret who hung around his great feet hoping he would kick up some tasty insects.
We saw a range of birds - crested barbet, malachite kingfisher eating a fish, 2 pied kingfishers fishing, African marsh harrier, fish eagle, greater blue eared starlings, yellow wagtail, squacco heron, water thick knee and wattled lapwing watched by a young Nile crocodile.
On the high grassy plains we saw eland, a lone oribi, giraffe and zebra with one who had had some of its stripes washed off!! Apparently if when they are very young they are caught in a strong rainstorm their skin can be affected (see today's photo)- and we know from yesterday they do get some mighty downpours.
We also fleetingly saw the rare blue monkeys.
We returned Boscoe to the HQ mid morning and returned to camp for a leisurely lunch, a snooze and photograph sorting!
Just after 2.30pm we headed to the boat dock for an hour cruise on Lake Ihema - the lake our camp fronted on to - and the largest in the park. Although we arrived well ahead of the 3pm the other 9 guests arrived after 3pm including a French family who finally arrived at 3.15pm!! Anyway all aboard we headed along the lake shore looking at birds and hippos before crossing to the island and seeing 3 enormous crocodiles and large colonies of nesting cormorants and darters. Just as we were concluding spots to rain started to fall so we sped back across the lake to our waiting vehicles but thankfully the worst to the rain was already over