Ngamo Village and Lions Sept 2 Tuesday

We started out our day with a game drive that included seeing a group of three lions resting under a tree. We pulled up to within 20 feet of them and just sat and observed. They just went about their business like we weren’t even there.

Next up was our A Day in the Life adventure. OAT provides this excursion once per trip and it’s an opportunity to spend some time in a local village. We visited Ngamo Village, which consists of 105 different homesteads. A homestead is a fenced area where extended family members live. We met Betty, a widow who owns the homestead, and her son, his wife, and their three children. When sons marry, they generally build a home and stay on the homestead, but some choose to start their own homestead. When a daughter marries, she moves to her husband’s homestead. We saw their homes, visited with several local villagers, spent some time asking and answering questions, and were served tea, polenta, kale with peanut butter sauce, and fresh rolls. Topics we discussed ranged from education to healthcare to guns to drug and alcohol problems. When I asked if any of them had ever been out of Africa, they all said no, but the one place they unanimously agreed on that they wanted to go was the US. Several folks brought school supplies to donate, and we as a group shopped in their local market for souvenirs and donated groceries and household supplies. It was a great opportunity to see once again that people all over the world are exactly the same. We may live under different circumstances, but everyone wants health, peace, and happiness. The locals we met seemed to possess all three.

Lions on our early morning game drive

Ngamo Village

When we got back to camp, we had a bit of free time before our evening activities. In the early evening we were lucky enough to have a pride of seven lions come close to camp. We didn’t have a game drive planned for this evening but they loaded us up and took us to see the lions. It was absolutely magnificent. We were so close we could have petted them. Apparently they see the truck as one big object that they know they can’t take down. But the guides said if one person had stepped out of the vehicle, they would have become a very famous but dead tourist. The lions were simply resting, grooming, and hanging out near the waterhole, waiting for the sun to go down to follow the group of nearby zebras and get some dinner. Please enjoy the photos compliments of beautiful Zimbabwe.

Before dinner, we hosted a local ecologist at the camp who gave a talk about trophy hunting, culling, and poaching. Covering a controversial topic is another activity OAT provides at least once per trip, and this was certainly interesting. Our speaker was a wealth of knowledge and we all learned a lot. In a perfect world, everyone would follow the rules, the money earned from trophy hunting would benefit the local economy, ivory wouldn’t be a sought after commodity, the animal meat would all be used, the overpopulation of certain animals would be controlled, and the declining populations would be preserved. Trophy hunting brings in more money than tourism, and let’s just say it’s not a perfect world.

After dinner we packed up to leave beautiful Zimbabwe and head to our next camp in Zambia in the morning. The whole experience here has been amazing.