The safari drive....1st night

Well this was my first safari drive. Our Ranger's name is Cameron. And our tracker's name is Richard. Richard sits on the front of the Land Rover on a little seat on the front hood with his feet dangling over the edge. We started off following a few dirt roads that intertwine on the sabi sabi property. 6300 hectars. We saw a few impalas which come to find out are plentiful. Then a few Gembok which have incredible horns. Then some Kudu. Unfortunately the computer is slow here so to upload all the photos will take forever. Now the goal for most safari goers is to see the big 5. This place has them all. In fact we saw these in the first 12 hours of my stay. The Giraffe was the first large animal that we saw. One male and 3 of his females. Most of the animals are not afraid of the Land rovers because they see the outline of the truck and not the people inside. One of the rules is we are not allowed to stand up. If we do they see the person and depending on the animal, will either attack or flee. Which neither one is what we want.
Next major animal was the African Elephant. The largest land animal on the planet. This lone bull was huge. He has a huge hole in his ear. Not sure what from. We had a wonderful sunset from a ridge where I had an incredible shot. Now how we find many of these animals is by the tracker. He looks at the dirt road for animal tracks. He can tell where an animal crossed the road and approximately how long ago. He will tell the ranger which way to go by pointing and other gestures. When we find something worth seeing they radio to the other trucks where the particular animal is and what he is doing such as on a hunt. We came across a leopard laying in the grass and got within 20 feet of him. He was stretching at sundown getting ready for the hunt. Every evening we have a sundowner which is where we get out of the truck on an open plain and have evening drinks and watch the stars appear. It is amazing how many stars are out there when there is no light pollution. Billions. Cameron is so knowledgeable about the constellations and pointed out all of them in the sky. The milky way was clear. Not a cloud in the sky. Well as the lights were all out and we were all by ourselves standing in the middle of nowhere. this loud grunting noise screamed out from behind us. We all jumped like terrified gazelles back to the truck. Come to find out it was an impala male herding up his harem for the night. It sounded like a grunting lion.
So far this trip has been exactly what I expected and then some.
More to come.