We got up painfully early this morning to try to catch the animals at their busiest, and we were in the park by 6.15am, with no breakfast. We needn't have bothered, because we didn't see very much for a couple of hours. The weather was overcast and it drizzled a bit, and I think all the animals were keeping their heads down. It got better though.

I drove along the main road through the park again, and took a side route which twisted and turned up a hillside with some great views over the lake where we were yesterday. We rejoined the other main road of the park and thank goodness at last we broke our duck on large raptors, seeing a black chested snake eagle circling and hovering above the valley. I drove along to where there's a hide beside a waterhole down a short but very bumpy track. I had to coax the poor little Toyota through a very deep and muddy puddle to get there. (There's a John Cooper Clarke poem about abusing hire cars that keeps popping into my head at such moments, although I can't remember how it goes.) Right in front of the hide a hippo was floating, with a turtle perched on its back. We waited half an hour or so with no more excitement than a foursome of blacksmith plovers arriving, and we were just packing up books and assorted optics to leave when I glanced out of the viewing slot at the far end of the hide. "*#€%!!!" I said. "Elephant!!!" I don't know how long it had been there silently drinking while we'd been looking in the other direction, but there was a massive bull elephant on the shore of the waterhole. Tusks the size of fence posts, great big flappy ears, nose like an elephant's trunk...the lot. Sadly it only remained for a couple of minutes, not long enough for Robbie to get her big lens screwed on so the photos won't do it justice. (She's always got the wrong lens on whenever we see anything good.) Elephant nonchantly wandered off to be swallowed whole by the vegetation. How can something so big simply disappear so utterly?

We drove back out of the park via the main roads, trying to get back to the lodge for breakfast by 10am, but we were doomed because there were birds and animals everywhere now, that we had to keep stopping to look at. The best was when we were only a few kms short of the entrance gate, and we saw a mother and calf rhino almost at the roadside. Once more the vegetation demonstrated its ability to swallow up huge herbivores, and the photos will be awful.

After a large late breakfast at the guest house we refreshed ourselves with a midday kip and a splash in the pool before striking out for the park again at about 2pm.

This time we did brilliantly for birds. The first big sighting was not a bird but a gang of about 15 banded mongooses writhing over one another just before the park entrance gate. We saw an outrageously multicoloured crested barbet in the same area, looking like a 1970s punk rocker. He was still hangin' around when we returned this evening. We took the first trail on the right after entering the park, which was unsurfaced but mostly OK to drive on, just a few places where the rain had eroded gullies that tested the poor little hire car to the limit. There were small birds everywhere, and apart from crawling along in 2nd gear at 10kph, we kept stopping every 10 or twenty yards to look at something. Notable birds were 3 different species of hornbill; shaft-tailed whydah, a small bird with four long wire-like trailing tail feathers that are twice the length of its body; and the even more remarkable long-tailed paradise whydah whose tail is almost 4 times the length of its body. These last were flying around doing aerial display flights to impress nonplussed looking dull brown females. Then a huge rhino waddled across the road in front of us and vanished into the thorn bushes. Half an hour later we saw another rhino, not far from the road and out in the open. Somehow still didn't get brilliant photos...

I took a wrong turning and forced the poor abused car down an even bumpier road, but the payback was that we saw a black backed jackal strutting through a grassland, quite a proud looking large fox-like creature with an odd black and white chequered pattern on its back. Glad to be back on asphalt again we headed straight back to the gate before we got locked in at 7pm, and had dinner at the Golden Leopard resort again. There was a family of warthogs in the car park. What have I forgotten to mention? ...ooh, lots and lotsa things!