Magnificent 7 Find Big 5 & More... All is perfect

Saturday we arrived at Lion Sands and met our ranger Talley, tracker Levi (yes the beloved Levi was indeed with us) and our personal butler Norman. We experienced a total of 6 drives and each one turned out to be more spectacular than the last. It is almost impossible to describe in words, no consonants, only vowels - iiiiiiiieeeeeeooooooaaaaaaa. Our stay at Lion Sands appropriately enough ended with tracking and finding the 5th of the Big 5.... The LION. Wow, we drove over trees, thru shrubs, bushes and hills up & down & up & down & up and then sideways because Levi had seen fresh tracks. The pictures will speak for themselves and we all including Talley and Levi were overwhelmed and exhilarated by the experience. At that moment our Magnificent 7 became 9. Not only did we learn and saw many animals, we are now walking encyclopedia's of flora and fauna and dung. (Ask Howard about his giraffe poop incident of 2009, and let him show you his trophy). After being spoiled with a total of 8 meals per day, including 3 breakfasts we are now blogging to you from Lower Sabi where we have begun our own personal journey with Howard as our Ranger and Al as our tracker. You should know that after picking up the rental 10 seater, and getting the perfect direction (go straight) we figured out that here in Africa in the southern hemisphere everything is upside down and after a 10 minute consultation at our first intersection, we decided to head to the main town just in case we were not heading in the right direction. Naughty baboons visited Elaine, Howard and Reno this am as they prepared to leave. The only casualty a fresh bag of sugar in the raw. So we prepare to head to Pretoriuskop as we search for the next 5 on this journey.