Jul 2004

After putting our truck, 21 people and a twelve-seater bus onto a very, VERY dodgy ferry, we completed a mountain of paperwork and finally made it into Botswana and headed straight for Chobe National Park.

We took a couple of game drives and spotted our first lions, as well as a pack of vultures mauling a bufallo carcass and an elephant which appeared to have five legs until closer examination proved him to be just very well endowed.

Lions

We later took a sunset cruise which was just brilliant. We watched for hours as the elephants crossed the river and the other animals came out to feed in the sunset. We saw lions and hippos and birds and snakes. Nature at its best.

Hippo

Lioness on the banks of the Chobe River

On then to the Okavango delta for a few days floating about the inlet in mokoros which are shallow, wooden canoes which are poled by men through the shallow delta waters. The mokoros were pretty unstable and the water was full of hippos and crocs gliding through the reeds. Pretty unnerving really.

Mokoros on the Okavango Delta

I was glad to reach the safety of an island in the middle of the Delta where we were to camp for two nights UNTIL the first thing we saw when we got out of the boat was the mauled carcass of a zebra!! Apparently hyenas are rife on the islands in the Delta and we went to bed the first night listening two them howling in the (not far enough for my liking) distance. The second morning we woke to find the most enormous, knee-high (I kid you not) pile of poo out the front of our tent, quite literally half a metre from our front door.
Cath to Becca: Did you do that?
Becca to Cath: Nope, is it yours?
Cath: Not mine
Becca and Cath: OK, good thing this tent has a back door.

I cannot remember once being drunk while camping in Southern Africa on the basis of my self-imposed fluid amnesty. By not drinking anything after 6:30 at night I figured I was decreasing my chances of being mauled by an animal if I didn't have to get out of my tent to pee in the night!!

Arrived at Livingstone International Airport ( translation: tin shed in desert) from London via Cape Town and an overnighter in Johannesburg and took an uneventful taxi ride to the Victoria Falls campsite where I checked into my tent-with-walls. The whole place was swarming with monkeys and baboons known to steal anything that's not tied down. An early night followed dinner and a beer while watching the sunset over the Zambezi River.

Baboon

I met an Aussie fellow called Shaun and his wife Ruth and Shaun and I decided to take a taxi to Victoria Falls with our cameras while Ruth went white water rafting. We drove through some rather Australian-looking bushland to the entrance of the Vic Falls National Park. The mist from the Falls is visible from Livingstone Airport and the campsite and the noise is a constant dull roar in the background. Arriving at the Falls, the sound of millions of litres of water dumping into the river is positively deafening. Note to self: if someone offers you a raincoat for $2, BUY IT!!!! I was saturated within 2 minutes of being there and my camera rarely made it out of my bag. We wandered around to the bridge that separates Zambia from Zimbabwe and watched the crazies bungee over the Zambezi River. Dinner with Shaun and Ruth, a random Italian guy and a weird assortment of monkeys, mozzies and scrub turkeys.

Victoria Falls

Cath arrived late the following day and we went into the township of Livingstone where we bought a few groceries. Everything seems to run on 'African' time, where African time = normal time + (1/2 an hour).

We took our first foray into the African animal kingdom the following day by means of a walking tour through the Mosi-Oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) National Park in search of one of only three white rhinos in Zambia. These rhinos are extremely rare because they're poached for their tusks which make big money in tribal voodoo. They're guarded (from a distance so that they don't become domesticated) 24 hours a day by our rangers who were carrying very conspicuous rifles. If a rhino attacked me, I'm pretty sure I'd be the one who was shot.

Rhino

I only felt mildly unsafe when we were surprised from behind by George the white rhino while our guides were distracted looking after a woman in our tour group who had fainted (no hat, no sunscreen, no water bottle in the middle of the African desert. C'mon, it's not rocket science). From then on, it was animals galore!! Zebras, giraffes, elephants, impalas, monkeys. Cath and I were like two little kids in a toy store!!

Elephant

Zebras

Giraffe