Blogs from North-West, Botswana, Africa - page 6

Monday March 24 Up again to greet a new day and head to the city of Maun, Botswana. We arrived at Maun about 2 pm and we had to prepare for our trip into the Okavango Delta. A river delta usually leads to the open sea right???? But in Botswana the Okavango River empties onto open land and floods the savannah. 18,000 acres of this swamp land!!! that is unique to this area in the world ONLY!!! Preparing for the 2 days in the Delta meant we each needed to buy 5 liters of water, choose carefully the ONE set of extra clothes we needed and prepare ourselves for extreme "out in the wilderness" camping. No power, no showers and no toilet. So...... prepare meant physically as well as mentally wrapping our heads around this unique ... read more

First some photos the story will folow soon.... read more

The usual group of “helpful” men surrounded us as we pulled up at the Zambian border post. I brushed off the offers of help, and scoffed at the threat that I would not be able to exchange Zambian Kwatcha once in Botswana. There was no reception on my phone to check the exchange rate, and I wasn't about to trust the money-changers' "best rate". The only thing was that they were right, once we got into Botswana I couldn't exchange my Kwatcha anywhere. In the end I rode back to the border from where we were staying, and aware of the irony of the situation started pestering a line of people leaving Botswana by offering a competitive rate for the exchange of Pula to Kwatcha... Before the realisation that I might be stuck with my Kwatcha, ... read more

Botswana, ‘The Land of firsts’. To elaborate slightly, it is in Botswana that for the first time in my life I have knowingly got out of a car and walked towards a pack of feeding lions, the first time I have woken up in the night with an Elephant less than six feet from my bed, and, perhaps more interestingly, it is the first country for which I can say perfectly accurately that I have had a beard for the entire time I was there. Wow, you are thinking, amazing, he’s got a beard! Now the decision to grow the beard didn’t come lightly, nowhere near as frivolously as I have just told you about it, but I thought I’d drop it in casually, mainly because I have had time to come to terms with it. ... read more

Geo: -19.0933, 22.4451The next few entries in our blog will be about our G Adventure overland trip. This one, the first of three or four entries, sees us travel by air from Arusha, Tanzania through Kigali and Johannesburg to Livingstone where Victoria Falls sits on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. After a day in Livingstone, we continued our 21-day-trip-in-a-truck and journeyed to Chobe National Park, the Okavango Delta and the Kalahari Desert in Botswana.In order to reduce the cost of our flight from Arusha to Livingstone, which should have been about a 3 hour flight, we flew for 18 hours through the night including two 5-hour stopovers. Upon arrival, we were as exhausted as our new travel-mates who had come from other continents! Our tour began with a preliminary gathering, meeting our fearless leader Wendy ... read more