Chobe

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Disaster strikes!

Driving in Africa is a bit different to UK as there are so many more obstacles. We usually work it that we have a driver and a "spotter" so that one of us can look out for the goats, cows, people, donkeys etc that get in the way. There are also quite a fews potholes which you have to avoid. The way that it usually works is when I'm driving Andy tells me I can go faster and when Andy's driving I tell him to go slower!

Our trip to Chobe started well. Andy was the driver and me the spotter. It seemed like a fairly good road but all of a sudden it went very bumpy (Andy was going to fast to do anything about it despite my shouts of "Potholes!! Potholes!!") and a very large bang confirmed that we had burst a tyre - oops! Not only had we burst the tyre but we had dented the rim of the wheel - good going!!

After a few very cross words Andy changed the tyre and we were very, very careful all the way to Kasane as we couldn't risk another burst! The road is terrible and some of the potholes stretch the whole of the way across the road and are really deep - apparently it's notorious and is because of the rains. So our first job in Kasane was to get a new tyre and the rim bashed out. This turned out to be easier that we thought, clearly it's a common problem!

Amazing Chobe!

After not the best of starts to the day we decided to head into Chobe National park to try to see some animals. So far our experiences have been drives but as the park includes the Chobe River, you can actually go game viewing on a boat.

We set off and after about two minutes we had seen an elephant and baboons. Five minutes later we had seen kingfisher, hippo, fish eagle and impala. The rest of the trip continued in the same way - animal, after animal - croc, kudu, monitor lizard - and not one but loads and loads of them. We spent the whole time with our mouths wide open. Particularly because you get so close to them. I had a bit of a scare when I'd been looking at a pod of hippo through the binoculars, took them down and realised that we that close I could nearly touch them!

The next few days we did some land based drives into the park and saw lions eating a dead elephant (it had died of anthrax) and giraffe for the first time. Again, you could get really close to the animals and the guides were really informative.

One of the really interesting things is that the elephant wade out into the river to eat the green grass and so in the boat you can get really close and actually move all the way around them. We also saw a fish eagle catch a huge fish which it couldn't fly off with as it was too heavy so it had to drag it out of the water, shielding it with it's wings - amazing!

We tried to get lots of pics (especially for my Grandad and wildlife enthusiast Gus) but we are not sure that we have done it justice.

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