July 11-13 Little Vumbura Camp

Our next stop was Little Vumbura camp. We were collected by another bush plane and transferred 10 minutes to the east. It’s amazing how different this camp is. Little Vumbura has more water and a lot of the activities center around boating. The trip from the landing strip involves about a 20 minute boat ride through the reeds of the Delta wetlands.

To the North of the camp there is dry land and we did two game drives there. Our other adventures were with a power boat and with a Mokoro boat, a hollowed out wooden boat which is polled in the water, of course today they might be fiberglass.

After seeing the spectacular sights at Duba it was hard to believe we could do much better. Well our experiences here came in a close second if not better. We spent around 20 hours gaming and at one point came across one of Africa’s endangered species, a Sable Antelope. It really didn’t look real it is such an unusual and beautiful animal. We spent long periods watching the Fish Eagles, then wow, one dives into the water and up with a catfish in its talons. It’s not the best photo technically, but you can see the whiskers of the catfish hanging as it took off out of the lake, what a moment, what a shot.

Everywhere you turn there is a photo opportunity after opportunity, the reflection in the pool was at sun down when we stop and have our “sun downers” that’s whatever you prefer to drink as you watch the sun go down in the Delta. Of course we went back and forth between champagne and chardonnay.

OK it’s getting late and we need to return to camp. We have been spotting in the dark for about two hours, then Rain our guide says hold on, I can’t believe it, it’s a Leopard in that tree. Very difficult to find Leopards they are nocturnal and mostly spotted only at night. He radioed to the other car from the camp what we spotted; they came in around 15 minutes later as we sat there and watched. He wouldn’t shin the light on the Leopard directly as it might hurt its eyes. He only shown the light near the Leopard which made taking a photo almost impossible. I have to thank the folks at Canon. I struggled for almost 100 shots with really no results, then I cranked the ISO to 6,400 an aperture of 5.6 with around a second exposure and after another 100 more shots managed to get this one of the Leopard, amazing thank you Canon.