Our camp-site for the night was in the Serengeti, with no fences. We were warned to keep our tents far enough apart that an elephant could walk through and reminded of the procedure for a night time toilet break. Despite being low season there was at least 100 people at the camp-site, I suspect that this generally scares animals away as no one heard an animal let alone had a close call. We were the last group to arrive at the camp-site and the first ones to leave this morning.

The sun was barely peaking over the horizon when we left for our game drive. Our first good sighting was a group of hippos in a pool of water along a creek. A few of the hippos were still out of the water from the night before, some of them were practising opening wide in a battle for mock dominance. We left them after quite a while watching and had quite a long period of nothing.

Our group was getting a little upset as every other 4wd in the area was on the opposite side of a river to us. They seemed to be stopping for things while we were just driving. Soon our two lucky charms kicked in again as a leopard appear on the road in front of us. Leopards are so reclusive that people can spend months in Africa (on safari) and never see one. This was our 6th leopard, but still great to see especially as she strolled right past our 4wd. As if that wasn't enough leopards her little cub soon came trotting down the road. There is a video of this, our 7th leopard!

The word soon spread that we had found a leopard (the 4wd drivers are always on the radio to each other) and a flock of safari vehicles encircled the mother blocking her off from her cub. After a little bit of distress the cub decided it was too much and disappeared into the grass and up a tree. The mother continued on presumably to go hunting. At one stage there was nineteen 4wds around the poor leopards. We felt bad and drove off. This was low season too, apparently in high season there can be over 100 4wds at a sighting. This complete invasion of animals lives put us off the Serengeti a little bit.

We drove around again on our own not spotting anything when our driver turned around and sped off. He refused to tell us where we were going or what we might expect to see. We did make him jam on the brakes so we could look at a family of Banded Mongoose though.

Off we sped again, still no idea why. Then we saw a group of 4wd around a tree. Another leopard? As we got closer we could see that there was lots of animals up the tree. A pride of lions.... up a tree?!?! In total there was nine lions up the tree including some little cubs. We knew that the smaller lions were ok at climbing but didn't realise the larger females could also climb to the tops of trees. Most lions don't and maybe it was just this one weird family. There seemed to be no good explanation for the behaviour.

The big male lion wasn't within sight, they definitely can't climb as they are too big. As we were leaving the lions our driver decided to take us right under the tree with one of the cubs almost in touching distance. The little one looked right at us with an inquisitive face and probably would have jumped in for a closer look given the chance. On the way back to the main road from the tree our 4wd became stuck in the ruts. This caused some nervous moments for the driver as he hopped out to lock the hubcaps and put us in 4wd. We wrongly assumed we were always in 4wd. The driver safely made it back to the car without attracting lion attention and drove us to safety then for lunch.

After lunch we left the Serengeti, back through the great migration, for Arusha and our camp in the Snake Park.