Kalahari

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Central Kalahari Game Reserve

The day after our 11 hour nothing journey we spent some time in Maun seeing if we could use the spare time to visit the Kalahari. The options boiled down to spending a lot on hiring a 4WD and camping or spending not too much more and staying in a luxury all expenses paid lodge. We decided to go for it and spend the money on the latter option. So we spent 2 nights, one full day and two half days in this lovely lodge out in the central Kalahari. It was all excellent and we're very glad that we went. We flew into the lodge, 40 mins in a 5 seater plane. We were fortunate enough to be the only guests in the lodge for the whole of our stay and so were utterly spoilt. The view from our room and the main verandah was utterly stunning. The lodge is on a slight rise in a very flat and arid landscape that we were mesmerised by, it felt like you could see forever and the stars at night- just amazing.

In the time we were there we only had three hours of free time during the day, the rest we were out on game drives that were essentially private ones, we had our guide Eddie and our San tracker KG for the whole time. Eddie was a fountain of knowledge on the local flora and fauna and we've learnt so much, particularly about animal behaviour. At this time of year there's not a great quantity of game to see but we saw plenty including new creatures such as the termite eating aardwolf and the lovely bat-eared foxes. Eddie insisted that after dark we were escorted to and from our tent, but this morning they spotted the tracks of 3 lions right outside the camp. We soon found them, a beautiful black maned Kalahari male and two big lionesses. These Kalahari lions are apparently a few centimetres taller than other lions. We had been watching them for a few minutes in the beautiful morning light when the females walked over to the male and one of them mated with him, this was followed by a big snarl from her and a loud roar from him.

We were well looked after on these drives with breaks throughout the day, a table set up with snacks, flasks of coffee and cold drinks for us, all in this stunning landscape.

KG our San tracker also did a bush walk with us and showed us which trees, bushes and tubers are used for food, water and medicine. He also showed us traditional clothing made from steenbok hide, how to make a trap to catch ground birds and how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together.

Altogether an excellent few days and it really reminded us what we love about Africa.

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Comments

[Nick]

The real thing
Sounds great. Of course we saw the real thing with a lot less effort at Disneys Animal Kingdom!! Including gorillas, tigers, elephants, hippos, dinosaurs and even a yeti...all in one day! Only some of them seemed to be made in china.x

[sarah]

This sounds wonderful xxx