Liwonde National Park

I just spent the last four days at the Liwonde National Park taking part in the annual game count. It consisted of other volunteers, rangers with M16s, and myself doing transect walks through the park and stationary counts. We saw herds of elephants, several hippos, hundreds of impala, hundreds of water buck, sable, kudu, vervet monkeys, yellow baboons, banded mongoose, warthogs, duiker, and probably a few other animals that I am not remembering. Put simply, I had a great time!

The first day we arrived about mid afternoon and just wandered around the youth hostel camp where we stayed. Immediately we encountered a handful of animals while walking around the mopane woodlands that constitute most of the park. It was a welcome shock to see animals; most people have few living around them except for livestock. It fulfilled part of our inaccurate expectations about this continent and were reminded us that we aren't in Kansas anymore. The couple animals we saw impressed us a lot, but the following several days eclipsed the sightings of the first day.

The proceeding days we woke up early in the morning to view the animals before the heat became unbearable. The second day I went on a "walking hide" where I wandered around a flood plain next to the Shire River. Right off the bat I saw endless amounts of water buck and impala with warthogs here and there. Everywhere I looked were these huge animals with horns casually grazing. They looked at us with caution, but never seemed to get unerved. If we came to close they'd saunter off, but never "ran for the hills". When my guide heard the hippos make there low Jabba-the-hut-bellow we looked at them in the river and that was super cool. And just as we were on our way back to the camp we were called back and saw 27 elephants in a giant herd. I was a bit far away from them, but judging from the gigantic foot prints left in the dried mud they must have been huge. It was awesome.

The next two days weren't as good for game viewing cause we were walking through the forest and that makes noise which scares off the animals.

time to go! Love ya! the boss says leave!