Advertisement
Published: June 17th 2017
Edit Blog Post
01 Our Campsite
Our first night of camping, hopefully no elephants walk to close to our tents. Geo: -20.21, 26.19
We had a long way to go today, so we got up at 4:30am and finished packing the car. I hope we have everything we will need for the next two and a half weeks - we should as the car was chock-a-block! Paul, Francois, Paul's dad John and I were going on a long road trip, our main destination was Mana Pools in north-western Zimbabwe with a few stops along the way.
By the time we finished packing the two cars and filling up the cooler boxes with ice from the lodge's ice machine, it was 5:45am. We then drove through the game reserve which took about 25 minutes. Then it was a short drive to the Derdepoort (South Africa) border. There was no-one else here, so we moved through very quickly without any hassles. The only problem we had was when the staff at the Kopfontein (Botswana) border wanted to look through Francois' car. Unfortunately they opened the cooler box that had fresh vegetables, so we lost our potatoes, onions and butternuts. It could have been much worse - we had quite a bit of alcohol and meat hidden in the two cars.
We stopped in the
02 Waterhole
The waterhole at the bar. first town to fill up the cars and jerry cans, as fuel is much cheaper in Botswana than South Africa or Zimbabwe. I asked the lady at the service station if they sold coffee. They didn't, I then asked her if there was anywhere in this town that sold coffee, she said that there was nowhere to get coffee, typical! We got back on the road.
During the long drive we stopped to stretch our legs, have a snack, swap drivers and cars. The road was long and straight, so boring! Along the way we saw villages and people selling buckets of mopane worms - yuck! Our next proper stop was in Francistown. Here we got more fuel and snacks for the road.
A few hours later at 4:30 we finally arrived at Elephant Sands. I was really looking forward to setting up the tent and then having a few drinks by the waterhole. Paul and I were the first to set up our tent, Francois was having trouble with his tent, which was amusing to watch and John was just slow.
We had not planned on cooking tonight as we knew that we were going to be tired after a
03 Kudu
A kudu that came down to drink at the waterhole. long day of driving. Yesterday I had cooked a few things for us to eat. So we ended up having an early dinner of potato salad, hummus, pasta salad, feta and spinach puffed rolls. There was plenty of food left over and it would be for our lunch tomorrow.
Once I had finished eating, I packed up and left the campsite for the bar. I bought myself a vodka, soda and passionfruit and made myself comfortable as I read my magazine, sipped my drink, enjoyed the nearby wildlife and watched the sun set. There were a few varieties of birds around and a kudu came to drink. Finally the guys joined me at the bar. The temperature was cooling down, so I layered up.
At 7 o'clock a rugby game started, this was not my ideal evening, but it had been a while since I sat through a game. We were chatting to the barman about our trip and he suggested we go through the Pandamatenga border, as it was closer than the Kazungula Rd border that we had planned to use.
During the evening three individual bull elephants came down to the waterhole to drink. The waterhole was only
04 Heaven
I was in heaven - time to myself with a magazine, enjoying a vodka, soda & passionfruit while sitting by the waterhole. about 10 metres away. There was not much separating them from us. The elephants were not bothered by our presence, they were busy enjoying the fresh water.
This evening in our tent, I was very cold. I wish I had made my hot water bottle.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.041s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0175s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb