I began this Mungari adventure with the story of taking the Pangolin for a walk. To end this trip, we got to walk with a cheetah….literally!!
The adventure started early on Sunday morning when Tamar approached me and said that when the satellite imaging came thru, one of the cheetahs was on the edge of the floodplain and that we could drive there to see it!!
Did we want to go????
YES PLEASE!!!
We climbed into the back of Bredger’s Land Rover and headed to the selected area. As we got closer, Tamar guided Bredger and then climbed on top of the cab to get a better reading…..

This particular antenna is a smaller version of the one that she used in the helicopter.
We drove some more and she isolated him to a small clump of palmettos. Bredger kept circling the trees and eventually, we caught sight of him…..

We kept nudging him and he move a bit further into view….

Then Tamar asked the wonderful question…..do you want to go walk out there with him??
ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!
When we answered in the affirmative, she told us to quietly walk at an angle to him and enjoy watching him close up.
As we walked off, Bredger gave us confidence by saying “God speed….”
It was the coolest thing to walk so close to him when he was in the wild.
Eventually he got tired of us ogling him and he took off one last time….

HOW COOL WAS THAT!!!
Tamar explained why it was safe for us to do this….. Cheetahs use their speed to hunt, coming up on the animal from behind and bowling it over and to the ground when it catches up to it. They do not like to approach an animal head-on!! So, unless we started running away from it, we were perfectly safe!!
As we returned to camp, the final sunset put a wonderful closure on our time in Coutada 11, in the Maramao complex of Mozambique……
