Advertisement
Published: August 23rd 2010
Edit Blog Post
Our home
Tracey outside our tent. We had just arrived at camp and put up our tent. I am writing this blog from Kampala - Uganda where I am currently volunteering. Our overland tour which took us through Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya has now come to an end. I have seen so much and allot has happened in only 21 days so I will attempt to summarise our African overland adventure.....
Our first day was an early start (6am) where we met with our tour group we will be spending the next 21 days with in very close vacinity and as you can imagine we were rather aprehensive. There are 22 people in our tour group from all over the world (US. Canada, Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Italy). We have 2 guides on our tour Bernard (BV) and Cassidy who are both from Zimbabwe. Bernard is our truck driver and Cassidy is our cook for the entire tour. We also were acquainted with "Freddy" our trustworthy overland truck. We were told to arrive at our departure point early (7am for a 7.45am start) however as we expected, we left late (9am - TIA).
Finally we were on our way to Lusaka - Zambia which was our first overnight stop on our tour at a camp
Freddy
Freddy...our overland truck. site outside Lusaka. Due to our late start we arrived at 8.30pm in the dark on our first night. Having had experience last year with putting up a tent it all came back to us and we managed ok...just. It was an exaughsting day so we retired to our tent early for another early morning start (5.30am).
The next 2 days saw us on the the road early morning heading towards our first game park called South Luangwa National Park. The drives were both very long 10 hour drives on very bad gravel roads and what the locals like to call "African massage". The roads are so bad that without seatbelts we are thrown up in the air due to the potholes. On the way to the park we passed small villages and small children walking to and from school. We also saw women carrying various food/items on their heads with small babies on their backs. The women do all the work in Africa!
We arrived at Luangwa for lunch which was very nice to arrive at camp in the day light. The campsite is perfect and is situated right on the banks of the Luangwa river. The
other side of the river to our campsite is the national park we were told the animals can freely walk into our campsite at night like hippo's and to be cautious if waking up during the night to go to the bathroom. The campsite has a pool and bar that overlooks the river and from both we saw hippo's in the water. It was very hot when we arrived so before lunch we all had a swim.
In the afternoon we went on a game drive into the national park at 4pm when the animals are most active. The national park has one of the highest populations of leopard and we were lucky enough to find a leopard. The leopard was sitting on a sandy hill and we were all very close. We were told the leopard had cubs however we could not see them. We also saw giraffe, impala, elephants and a hippo lying down out of the water which is quite unusual as hippos are normally in the water for most of the day. We stopped for drinks just before sundown at a picturesque spot right on the banks of the river in the national park where
Leopard
Leopard protecting her cubs. we could see hippos and also elephants in the distance. On our way back to camp after sundown we saw several hyenas scavenging for food. We were back at camp by 8pm for a hot dinner and some more drinks around the camp fire.
The next day we woke up early (6am) for an early morning game drive into the same national park. The most exciting thing we saw was an elephant that mocked charged a group on an open top vehicle. The elephant walked right in front of their vehicle. We were not far away and it was rather scary to watch. We were told elephants do not have very good eyesight and that all they would see one large figure and would not charge however we would not like to chance it! We made our way back to camp for a cooked brunch and spent the afternoon relaxing around the pool and reading our books. We were entertained by some daring baboons who were stealing apples from our campsite and other campsites. We were told by the locals that work at the campsite the baboons know how to open the zippers on our tents. We were rather
skeptical until a member of our group had that happen to her. The baboon unzipped her tent and went through her luggage and threw all of her clothes around in the tent until it was chased away.
Our next destination is Malawi.....stay tuned....
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 10; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0413s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb