Botswana

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!!