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Published: August 12th 2006
Critters in Botswana
Chobe National Park didn’t disappoint - within an hour of entering we had spotted our first
real lions (we’ve decided the sleeping one we saw in Kruger, which looked small and vague even through binoculars, doesn’t count). A pride of six mature lionesses and one young lion walking alongside the river occasionally drinking and completely ignoring the half a dozen vehicles jostling for views meters away from them. I must say that in real life lions are a lot bigger than I thought they would be. Later that same day on an evening game drive we also saw a sleeping lioness with three healthy and playful young cubs. The cubs clambered and fought over a dead tree, all energy and curiosity, while mum languished behind them having a well earned rest.
Chobe is also home to the biggest -by far - herds of elephants we have seen so far. In the afternoon they would descend to the river to drink. The largest group we saw would have had over 60 elephants in it (apparently some groups get to 200, or so our mammals book tells us). On our second day we got caught up in an elephant
Look - Real Lions!
These lions were excellent sports, and K did well to avoid capturing the other half dozen vehicles in her picstraffic jam as the elephants in the front of a group had stopped at the river’s edge, wary of some safari boats watching from the water. All the other ellies patiently queued behind those that had stopped, completely blocking the track. It was just as frustrating as a real traffic jam - a lot of the majesty of an elephant goes out the window after 10 minutes of staring at the big grey ass of an unmoving one blocking the road.
After Chobe we moved on to its sister national park, Moremi - which was of a very different character. Chobe is minutes away from the tourist town of Kasane, but it took us many detours and the use of our GPS to even find the gates of Moremi. Where Chobe effectively consists of a single safari highway on the well defined edge of a river, Moremi is a maze of tracks, many of them unusable due to trees pushed over by elephants or the waters of the Khwai River, which slosh around in an ever changing series of swamps, lagoons and streams. We had to work hard for our animals as views are limited by trees and scrub,
Jockies
One of our favorite animal antics is young baboons who ride their parents around. Baboons are a bit of nusiance in campsites though, K actually had to kick one that was trying to get our dish cloth (the only reason we could think it wanted it was that it is the same colour as a banana). but we did see a range of new ungulates and some rare side-striped jackals. It felt like the sort of place that would reward more careful and patient exploration, so it’s one more place on our list of desired African repeats.
Baobab Hunting
We decided to skip our planned city stop in Maun and instead detoured 200 kilometres to the west out to the Mgadigadi salt pans, which are vast and inhospitable stretches of crusty salty white earth, fringed around the edge with palm and baobab trees. The place we stayed at, Planet Baobab, was a brillant set up with unlimited hot water which was a godsend, because the nights were cold and we were so dirty and dusty from our time in the national parks that I could write my name in the grime on K’s shoulders.
We spent most of one day crisscrossing the edge of the pans trying to track down the giant Chapman’s Baobab using GPS coordinates provided by some other travellers - which unfortunately turned out to be set to a different baseline than our GPS but weren’t so far out as to be obviously incorrect. Happily we stumbled across the famous and
Bridge Over the River Kwhai
Those sticks are truely part of a bridge over a very real river. The bridge is made completly from (rotten) logs, but happily holds large trucks and tankers...at the moment... exclusive Jack’s Camp - way out of our price range (US$1000+ per night), but they were good enough to give us some decent directions and also at that stage we’d spotted the blasted tree on the horizon. The Baobab, once found, was indeed big. Coincidently that night we spent a bit of time talking to the wife of “Jack” of Jack’s Camp, who is a bit of a legend around these parts. She was a great story teller and spun a good yarn about survival in the pans and the skills of the native San people.
Back through Maun, staying just long enough to rescue our CDs, which we had foolishly left behind the bar at Jungle Junction in Zambia (that open bar was bound to have it’s negative side!). Brett managed to pull some strings and have them smuggled across the border into Botswana and then flown out to us, for which we are very grateful - almost as much personal attachment to our CD collection as to our photos. The Beast also received a bit of TLC in Maun in the form of a new “flasher unit” for our indicators, which had stopped working - probably as
a result of one too many high speed bumps.
Lions in the Delta
Next on the itinerary was something that we had been looking forward to as one of the highlights of the trip - a mokoro (dug-out canoe) safari into the Okavango Delta. We spent two nights on the delta pretending to be in our own BBC nature documentary. It was fantastic to be at water level, pushing through the reed and lily pad clogged waterways of the delta amongst the birds and insects. During the first night we heard lions, which our guide, Bee, thought were on the
next island (although we noticed he piled a heck of a lot of wood onto the fire after that). Early on the second morning we paddled to the next island and set out on foot to find the growling critters. We found a number of well chewed warthog remains and Bee was getting very excited about various scratchings in the dust which, we were told, were fresh lion and fresh leopard prints. We were just starting to get sceptical, thinking things were being over hyped for our benefit, when a startled herd of lechwe (kind of swamp adapted antelopes)
Glade in Moremi
More often than not the tracks ended in swamps or little waterlogged glades like this. Very pretty. started running straight towards us. Behind them we could see a lion stalking through the grass. Seeing a lion while on foot and on its own turf with no real protection was a real heart-pounder. We admired until it passed out of sight and then beat a hasty retreat to our mokoro.
Natured out after the delta we headed to the nearby Tsodilo Hills, which are famous for ancient rock art (the most famous of which, perhaps more due to its name rather than the quality of its depictions, is the “dancing penises” mural). We had a little San chap guide us around whose grandfather had lived on the hills. The San, we learnt, consider the hills the site of creation and the guide was adamant that it was the gods that made the paintings and not man. He was excellent at interpreting the paintings and it was interesting to hear him talk, quite bitterly, about the “Botswana people” who he clearly thought of as colonial interlopers that had disrupted the San way of life. There is quite a bit of touristy hype in Botswana about San culture but it seems that the San don’t consider themselves Botswanan at
all.
Critters in Namibia
We had planned to camp out at the hills but with the dancing penises admired, the sun still high and the border so close we decided to cross into Namibia and check out the small but perfectly formed Mahangu Reserve. The crossing into Namibia was wonderfully relaxed, with staff on both sides of the border the sort of people that we wanted to hang around and chat to more rather than just grabbing our passport and running. The border opens into the middle of the Mahangu Reserve so within two minutes of being in the Namibia we were dodging zebra, giraffe and sabre-horned sables.
Good game spotting continued with our visit to the last game park of our trip - Etosha. If we had to pick just one park to go back to or recommend it would have be Etosha. It is a sprawling park on the edge of a massive salt pan (apparently its name means “great white space”) and there are no real rivers, only a series of waterholes which means you
know that the animals are going to have to be near by. The lions know this as well and almost
More Ellies
The big Ellies are always so protective of the little ones and try and get between you and them when ever possible. However some of the little ones love to tromp around and squeek and wag their ears at cars in practice for when they are bigger. every second waterhole had a pride of lions lazing by it. The lions all looked well fed and seemed to be enjoying life immensely and we spent hours at waterholes watching the sprawling big cats and the hoards of nervously drinking ungulates. The highlight was probably seeing a mother lion, with blood around her mouth fresh from a zebra kill, ushering her three tiny cubs along.
Each of the three campsites also had their own waterholes which were dimly lit at night. After the sun went down the people would gather on one side and the animals on the other. Apart from the usual range of zebra and giraffe and other hoofed beasts, the night time viewings also gave us good number of rhinos and jackals and, tantalisingly, on our second night, a leopard which loped out of the darkness, sniffed around the edge of the waterhole and then disappeared again.
We had great company in Etosha as we’d picked up a Canadian couple called Jess and Scott, who had been travelling for almost two years, with a good chunk of that time in Australia and NZ. For backpackers without their own transport they were carrying the most
Extreme Picnicing on the Pans
No need to look far for salt for that tomato sammie. ridiculously large pot (about one and half feet across) and wooden spoon (about two feet long), which I’m gutted we didn’t take a picture of. There was much lamenting one night when a jackal made off with the wooden spoon, but it was found again in the morning only slightly gnawed. They also told us that in Canada you can get maple syrup flavoured baked beans, but I am not sure whether they were taking the piss or not - so if anyone can confirm that or otherwise, I’d be keen to know.
Bloody Hell
We’ve just had a bit of scare. In our last night in Etosha K started complaining of a nasty stomach ache. Doctors are notorious hypochondriacs and have the most wonderful imaginations as to what their own mundane symptoms may be while being dismissive when others complain of the same. K thought right from the start that she appendicitis or maybe a really bad ovarian cyst. To begin with I put it down to the after effects of a pretty dodgy boerewors sausage we’d had the night before. (There is that doctors saying that when you hear hoof beats, you think “horsie” and not “zebra”
Chapmans Baobab
It took six hours and over 200 k's of driving to find this tree (it was about 25 k's from our camp). - but then, in insight, what do you think when you hear hoof beats in Africa?)
Things got worse overnight so we thought we’d play it safe and drive straight to Windhoek in case there was no improvement through the day. By the time we’d got to Windhoek in the early afternoon K was a groaning, vomiting hunched over little ball so we headed straight for a private clinic. K had a quick consult with a Russian GP who wanted an ultrasound done because she could feel a lump in K’s side. Not only was she an excellent GP but she was also excellent at bashing down all those walls that pop up in African anytime someone wants something done quickly. K had the ultrasound two hours later and the results were ominous - there was a lot of fluid in her right side obscuring both her appendix and an ovary. The specialist that did the ultrasound ordered an urgent laparoscopy with the rider that hunks of appendix/ovaries/other bits may need to be removed depending on what was found.
So within four hours of arriving in Windhoek I was in an operating theatre holding K’s hand as they
Flowers in the Delta
There can't be many more photogenic subjects than lillypads and their flowers. anesthetised her. It was one of the scariest moments of both our lives because we still didn’t know what was wrong and the range of possibilities was pretty horrible. The whole idea of going under the knife in Africa is not a pleasant prospect (although the Rhino Park clinic facilities and staff were first rate). It turned out to be her appendix in the end (as in “end of the day”, not K’s end). Apparently it was one of the thicker appendixes the surgeon had seen and he was a little surprise, but pleased, that it had got so large without yet rupturing. We’ve got a picture of K holding her appendix, but it is still on the camera so will have to wait for the next blog (it looks like this horrible giant walnut). The operation and recovery went well and K only needed to spend two nights in hospital (which was a heck of a lot more luxurious than the hostel I spent time in). She is out now and we are going to take it easy for the next couple of days in Windhoek and follow it up with a more pedestrian final couple of weeks to
It is the right way up!
The lillies are the real subject and the trees are reflections in the water - K is getting pretty clever with that camera of hers. our African trip than we’d previously planned.
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kath and nick
non-member comment
HOLY SHIT
Hey guys, wow, hope you are feeling OK K. we wondered if you were in the same hospital as Angelina and Brad!