Mike is a Touron

Karma sure is a funny thing. Here at Sangita Sasakwa there are no fenced boundaries and you are literally in with the animals. On one of our drives, Mike was telling our guide Silas about Tourons, part tourist part moron.

We have been on planes or in land rovers pretty constantly so we were itching to stretch our legs just walking for birding like we usually do. They told us during orientation/welcome that we are not allowing to walk at night without a security guard escort (they are armed.) It wasn’t really clear you couldn’t walk outside the area where the lodge buildings are during the day, however, so Mike says let’s bird the road that Silas uses to drop us off at our Hillside Suite. Seemed like a good way to work off our meal so I agreed.

We got pretty far down the road before the troops were out looking for us. The security guard must not have been at his post or he would have stopped us. And we should have known better ourselves as we walked and mike said, oh, look, some cat prints in the mud. So a game drive vehicle with guests passed us and they must have used the radio to report two idiots out walking among wild animals because soon along comes a golf cart with a very pleasant woman telling us to get in, then she radios another guy to say she has us, he joins us on foot all out of breath and heart racing, gets in the cart explaining how worried he was as there is a leopard with cubs in that area and that buffalo like to hide behind bushes - among other things!

They were all very worried and upset but extremely nice about it and we apologized profusely and said we will never do it again. They had the security guard escort us back to our house and I’m sure they are going to keep a much closer eye on us now. 

And I think they are employing the vervet monkeys to help them! The monkeys came along shortly after we got back in under the guise of getting a drink from our pool, but it was really to scare me back inside the house! So we had our dessert inside.