60 Elephant and a very straight road

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Warwick in his usual stomach oriented way had arranged for us to have a full English at the campsite for breakfast and it was glorious, we hadn’t had a proper breakfast in 7 weeks and there was even bacon.

We then headed to the Namibian border at Ngoma river which was about a half hour away. The exit of Botswana was easy but in Namibia they wanted us to pay road tax and their card machine was broken and they only took Botswana or Namibia money. So we had to go back to Namibia and go to a con-artist at the border there who changed some money for us at an obscene rate. Once back we sorted the border easily.

We then started a very long straight road along the Caprvi strip. It’s a curious strip of land along the north of Namibia which used to be a demilitarised zone with Angola. As such it was largely devoid of people for many years and the wildlife took over. It represents an enormous park with a few accessible points. We found one of these about lunchtime and spent 3 hours along sandy roads by rivers and waterholes searching for wildlife.u

We finally saw 5 elephant playing by the water shore and thought we would have a spot of lunch and within 20 minutes there were 60 elephants drinking, playing and mucking around. There was even a baby elephant that couldn’t have been more than a few months old. Needless to say Warwick took around 200 photos with his enormous camera lens and to be fair it was very impressive, we’ve never seen so many elephants.

We drove out of the park in a spot of rain which made the difficult conditions a little more challenging but thankfully far from getting stuck. We then resumed another 2 hours of the worlds straightest and most devoid of life road. We passed around 5 cars in the whole time and could count on 2 hands the number of people/houses we saw.

Eventually we made a town called Divundu (although town may be strong) where we stopped for fuel and then headed to an idyllic campsite on the shores of the Okavango river which is huge and very full and explains why the delta is so wet.

Our campsite is literally on the lakeshore with a sign saying beware of crocodiles. It seems alright at the moment but could make going to the toilet in the night a more intense affair.

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