Chobe and Nata

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Chobe National Park and Nata Bird Sanctuary

Chobe National park is in the North East corner of Botswana. We stayed outside the park, near the entrance, in the town of Kasane. Camped in the grounds of a top end lodge. The main attraction here is visiting Chobe Riverfront, part of the national park. We visited three times over the three days we stayed there, the first day we managed to hire a 4 by4 truck just for one day, the following fternoon we did a river cruise and the last day a late afternoon game drive through the lodge. The day in our own vehicle meant we could spend many hours driving up and down the river front tracks, on the other two we learnt a lot from the informative guides, all experiences in the park were very enjoyabe, we were amazed at the number of elephant we were able to see, Innoent, our guide on the last day, said there were hundreds of thousands of elephants in Chobe. We also saw big herds of impala, giraffe, warthog and baboons, plus three new (to us) anteope; puku, red lechwe and sable. We also enjoyed the plentiful birdlife there, so many waterbirds; herons, storks, geese, kingfishers and most interesting of all the African Skimmer, it's an endandgered species, flies just bave the water with its long red beak just skimming the top of the water, beautiful to watch. The light in the late afternoons also added to the beauty of it all.

From Kasane we drove south to Nata and camped in another very nice lodge. Again in the late afternoon we took a game drive, this time to see the birds in the local sanctuary. This sanctuary is in the Sowa Pan, part of the 12 000 sq km Makgadikgadi Pans, it's a vast flat salt pan, the lowest point in Botswana. There was a big lake still in part of it and this had hundreds of very pink flamingos feeding in it, plus a number of other waterbirds. It was a cloudy day so no good sunset but we were able to walk cautiously out to the edge of the lake and get quite close to the flamingos and hear them chattering away while they fed.

We are now in Maun, west of Nata, the gateway to the Okvango Delta.

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