Blogs from Botswana, Africa - page 63

Hi everyone! Bry has done an excellent job blogging our life here, but now I shall take a turn and try to fill you all in on my life at work. Apologies in advance if this is a bit more boring than Bry's usual entries :) I am working at Godisa Technologies Trust (www.godisa.org), a very interesting place indeed. Godisa (it means "to help things grow") is a social enterprise, although that terminology is new and unfamiliar here in Botswana. It is a charitable trust with deaf empowerment as a core value, but we assemble and sell products including hearing aids, batteries, support equipment like audiometers, and Godisa-invented and developed solar powered chargers for the hearing aids & batteries. The solar powered charger is ingenious - often the cost of batteries is as expensive as the ... read more

So here I am at the end of my time in the beautiful Botswana! BUT before i talk about THAT I'll finish off recounting my time in South Africa! When I last wrote i'd just arrived in Pretoria. SO on our first full day in Pretoria we went to the apartheid museum in Johannesburg (about 45mins from pretoria) which was a real eye-opener. I found it really interesting and I'm glad i went - there was sooo much to take in though! Need to spend a whole day there to really get to grips with everything. We didn't have that kind of time though as we went from here to visit Soweto (an acronym for 'south western townships') which was really cool. Much more built up than i thought it was going to be - there ... read more

Its actually the 12th May, but im still behind having only just found decent internet! Well ... in Botswana we also went to Maun. The Chobe NP is very pretty. We saw lots more animals including some much bigger crocs, hippos and their babies and more of the now very familiar elephants, zebra's and giraffes. We were almost charged by an elephant at the side of the road because someone shouted from the truck forgetting the windows were open! Apparently it was only a mock charge though. Then in Maun we went in to the Ocovanga Delta, a bush camp where we saw hippos really close and elephants, then the following day we did a flight over the delta which was amazing, we saw croc's and hippos and elephants really close despite being in the plane. ... read more

Fri 30th Up at 5.30 for a quick snack then on a truck fro 25 to Chobe National park. We saw lions just after they had killed a buffalo and spotted a leopard which means I’ve now seen all the big five- Leopard, Lion, Buffalo, Elephant and Hippo. It was a shame the truck was so big as if you were sat on the wrong side from the animals you cant see very clearly. In the afternoon we went on the boat trip that I had paid extra to do on the way up. We saw loads more this time- Hippos again and then elephants, a breed of baboons only found in Botswana, eagles and Kudo. ... read more

Mon 26th Up at 5.30 for bush walk. It was a very brisk pace and we saw some cool footprints of elephants and wild dogs and some sort of cat, but that was it no animals. Then we had a 3 hour drive to Thebe which I slept through. After lunch (we make sandwiches at the truck) we went on a boat cruse down Chobe river. It was really good, not just the animals but some cool sky, a rainbow and a bit of thunder and lightening but not on us. Most impressively we saw lots of Hippos but we also spotted small crocodiles, kudo and impala, some cool birds including pied kingfishers and swarms of dragonflies that reminded me of the flying keys in Harry Potter. Back at the campsite it had rained hard ... read more