Botswana

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We arrived in Chobe and were soon on our first game drive which started early doors at 6am! It was freeeeeeeezing! We had one sleeping bag between all of us and i'd like to say it was worth it but, frankly there were no animals at all for a good 2.5 hrs! This is a place with over 70,000 elephants...how do you hide that many elephants?! However, just as were about to leave we heard some impala braying and so headed down to the river bank. Here we managed to see a leopard dragging an impala into some bushes! We narrowly missed the kill as it nailed the impala while it was taking a leisurely drink at the river! In order to get a better look we were all climbing about the van and then while the guide tried to manouvre into a position wih a better vantage point he managed to drive into tree and up a non-negotiable river bank with me one roof!

We returned back to the camp site where a while later our non-leopard seeing Dutch friends turned up and so we of course greeted them with 'Guess what we've seen?' - we're so kind!! In the evening however we went on a river safari which redeemed Chobe (apart from the last minute leopard sighting of course)! On the river safari the promised chobe elephants materialised in their hundreds! We also got up close and personal with some crocodiles while we literally, rather unervingly, beached ourselves next to as they basked in the sun as well as various other beasties!




From Chobe we headed to the Maun, the gateway to Okavanga delta. After finally managing to explain to the bus driver that we would pay for any seats that our bags would take up by resorting to pretending to him that bags were people, we finally got on the way and then broke down two thirds of the way there! After declining the kind offer of a lift from a local for only the three girls and tonly if he took not the three boys we were with but three local guys we managed to hitch a lift the rest of the way with a guy with rather more scruples who dropped us off at our campsite!

Maun was an exciting place for me for two reasons. My boyfriend, Pats, was going to be arriving in a matter of hours and the Okavango delta was in store. One was a bit a of a disappointment and it certainly wasn't Patsy! We decided to do a flight over the delta as it was supposed to be the only way to see it. For a delta, while pleasant enough, it looked remarkably dry to us and while we saw a fair few animals it didn't exactly bowl any of us over. The delta, confusingly, gets wet in Botswana's dry season by which time the rains from Angola have filtered down and fully flooded the delta. Information that we should have probably found out before hand...We were a few months early!



Anyway, when in Rome and all that so we headed into the delta on the traditional mokoro (a dug out canoe) trip. Pats and I sat in ours and nearly sunk it and spent the next several hours sitting fairly rigidly about an inch above the water line expecting to sink at any moment! We did however get to see our mokoro drivers village which consisted of small cylindrical dwellings where the the integral material was empty beer cans...we did our bit for the local community and did our best to supply a few more! The trip took us into the delta where we had a go at doing the 'mokoro punting' which we turned into gondola jousting and managed to sink all three of the mokoros! (they're actually quite heavy when you have to empty them out of water!) We were then taken off on a four hour walking safari into the 'island' of the delta (which was seemingly most of it when we were there) and as such the main focus of our guide were the piles of elephant pooh - thrilling!




It was a whistlestop tour of Botswana and from Maun we were destined for Windhoek, Namibia. Some poor travel advise made it an intresting journey! In theory the route consisted of: A bus fomr Maun every hour from 5am (we needed to get the first one to get to windhoek the same day) to a half way point followed by a taxi to the junction to the border and then another bus to the border where there were 'loads of buses to Windhoek'. the reality was: A single bus out of Maun which left at 8.30am (not the best news when you’ve turned up at 5am), hence we tried to hitch but, failed so returned to the bus stop and got the bus half way, managed to get another bus from there all the way to the border with a driver who seemed fairly keen on leaving without people when they stopped to go for a pee (however saying that, they did actually seemed to link up - unpresidented in Africa). Then having got to the border, far from loads of buses, there were no buses whatsoever from the border to Windhoek. We managed to hitch with a lorry driver named George who was very nice although I am not entirely sure sober! We finally arrived at Windhoek where we got the hostel owner out of bed to sort us out a dorm! Welcome to Namibia!

full pictures at: http://picasaweb.google.com/JimmahW/Botswana2008

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