Toka Leya

 August 5

We spent the morning birding around the Amani Victoria Falls resort; highlights included two kinds of kingfisher and a tree filled with twelve trumpeter hornbills.  We spent quite a bit of time chasing the elusive but aptly named Giant Kingfisher.  It is truly enormous, but also very skittish, so while we saw him several times, the camera didn’t.  We also encountered a pack of about 20 banded mongoose, which are always fun to watch as families and as scurrying waves across the ground. Late morning we transferred to Toka Leya, the first location for the main trip. Toka Leya refers to a local Zambian tribe that have been the hereditary caretakers of the falls. The camp is luxurious and right on the Zambezi River. The views from every part of the camp are wonderful, but the views from our cabin, the furthest away at about 1/4 mile, are stupendous. We saw 2 elephants on our way to the cabin, and about an hour later realized that an additional 22 had arrived! There were several quite young ones, one of whom amused himself by chasing away the bushbuck that had been resting in the shade of a tree nearby. 

Late afternoon we met the rest of our group, including two friends from our 2018 Madagascar trip. The final two members of our group of six are friends or family of our friends.  We had tea together and then went for a sunset cruise on the Zambezi, including hippos, crocodiles, marabou storks and a (small) Nile monitor. The hippos are quite territorial, so the boat had to divert around them. This is tricky as they only surface briefly to breathe and then submerge again, so you have to watch the surface bubbles to guess where they are underwater and what to avoid!

Pictured: elephants (duh),  nile monitor, banded mongoose