Until I travelled in Botswana, I didn't think that I was scared of thunderstorms - in fact, I thought I liked them. Now I know better! There is nothing quite like lying awake in a flimsy tent in the middle of the night watching as lightning flashes illuminate the sky like a strobe light, and at the same time gaining a first hand appreciation of what it means for thunder to "roll" across a sky. I found myself trying to count the seconds between the two in the hope that my frantic heart's racing would slow down once I had some kind of proof that the storm was actually centred quite a way away... when the thunder and lightning started to strike simultaneously however, I bolted upright in my sleeping bag and instead tried to work out what would happen if one of the tent poles was hit by lightning, seeing as the eye of the storm was clearly located directly over my head! I couldn't decide whether the tent and everything inside it (myself included) would be instantly fried, or if just the tent fabric would go up in smoke and I'd be left open to the elements and looking a bit like a cartoon character with frizzy (i.e. electrified) hair, crazy eyes and smoke wafting up from the bare tent poles! At any rate, it occurred to me at some point during that night at Maun that perhaps the story of Ray Sullivan - the poor bloke who holds the record for being struck by lightning a mammoth SEVEN times - wasn't quite so tragically hilarious after all.
When I wasn't spending my time cowering from one fierce storm or another, Botswana delighted with its varied landscape and abundant wildlife. We spent a couple of nights in Chobe and then a few more in the Okavango Delta before moving on to Namibia via the friendliest customs officials I've ever met.
Although still a game park, Chobe was quite different to the Mara and the Serengeti. The landscape at Chobe is largely made up of dusty red hills where the stripped down trees show the impact of the park's famous elephant population. The combined effect leaves the impression that you could be driving through a moonscape, it's quite a bizarre sensation.
Half of us chose to do the optional "luxury overnight stay" within Chobe National Park. I was pretty sceptical about the "luxury" moniker when we were told that this actually meant "luxury camping" - I mean, talk about an oxymoron! - but when we arrived and I saw that my tent had a portable wash-stand out front, and a full-on zip-up mattress complete with sheets and a pillow inside, I was forced to reevaluate. It's also the only place where we all sat around a table (in the middle of the bush no less) for a three course candlelit meal, which would have been perfect but for the bugs that insisted on dining with/on us throughout.
During the night (as I lay in my comfy bed) I listened to what I assumed were elephants grunting and eating their way around our camp - fortunately I fought the temptation to go outside to try to sneak a peek at them because, as I learnt the next morning, the grunting wasn't actually elephants - turns out it was one of the resident leopards coming to check out our temporary camp!
While we were in Chobe we also went on an evening cruise on the Chobe river, which runs between Namibia and Botswana. From the river boat we saw a bird of prey clutching some kind of giant, wriggling fish in its talons, plenty of buffalo, crocs and baboons hanging out on the banks, and large groups of hippos wallowing in the shallow pools and seemingly climbing all over each other. Although we could generally only see their heads above the water, up close you get a real sense of how overwhelmingly ginormous they are - there's no way I'd ever have been able to wrap my arms around their necks even if I'd wanted to and/or been stupid enough to get that close! One of the highlights of this particular boat ride was finally seeing (and capturing on film) a hippo yawning... although one of the more interesting things I learned from the captain of our trip - hippos don't actually yawn, instead it seems that they're warning you to back off or they'll charge - there's a mistake I'd rather avoid making!
From Chobe we had a long drive to Maun, the starting point for our trip into the Okavango Delta. Early the following morning we headed out to the mokoro station and met our polers. A mokoro is basically a dug out canoe and, as the name suggests, the polers stand at the back of boat and use long wooden poles to manoeuvre them through the delta's waterways. As a passenger in a mokoro, you sit extremely low in the water and this basically means that you're eye level with hundreds upon thousands of water lilies as you drift through the larger pools, and that reeds tower above you (and tend to smack you in the face!) as you rush through some of the narrower streams.
We spent a couple of nights camping on one of the larger islands in the delta. While there we went on game walks and mokoro rides in the mornings and evenings, and managed to get up close and personal with elephants grazing, zebras crossing waterways and some gruesome carcass remains from leopard and lion kills. During the walks, our guides also introduced us to the "small five" - ant lion, red billed buffalo weaver, rhino beetle, leopard tortoise and elephant shrew. It was too hot in the middle of the day to do anything and so we'd hang out at the camp instead - either following the shade as it moved across the site, or cooling off in the local swimming hole.
The highlight of the trip, as is so often the case, was definitely the people we met while we were there. There was Brave, our poler, who was training to be a guide and seemed to know the name and habits of every bird/frog/animal we saw or heard along the way. And Judge, who was a giant of a boy and had a tendency to grunt like a gorilla as he drank his morning coffee, but who was also very good natured and would erupt into fits of giggles after he'd swum underwater and grabbed someone's leg - usually Simon's - making them jump and scream at the thought that there were crocs and/or hippos in our swimming hole. And finally there was Reuben... here, words fail me, so I'm going to use some of his own: "I'm a white man in a black man's skin [from getting sunburnt one afternoon apparently] and I have a small head but a big brain... that's so big my head hurts"!
On our final night in the delta we played games with the guides and polers - things like "Simon says" but in their local language (I got down to the last three but wasn't good enough to see off Reuben or Judge) and that drinking game (minus the alcohol) where you each pick an animal name and then use it to move turns around the group, trying to trip people up along the way ("elephant, elephant - warthog, warthog", "warthog, warthog - lion, lion"...). The locals put us to shame in the singing department as well - they pretty much put on a half hour show of amazing singing and dancing for us - and we couldn't even manage the hokey pokey in return. Disappointing effort on our part!
A few of us finished off our delta experience with a half hour scenic flight over the region. The landscape is incredible and from the air you get a much better sense of just how expansive it is. It was also a real buzz seeing hippos grazing on land for the first time of the trip, and herds of elephants playing in the waterways. We also saw some giraffe and buffalo which we hadn't managed to spy during our game walks and mokoro rides, which was pretty cool as I hadn't realised before the trip how abundant and varied the wildlife (as opposed to the plant and bird life) in the delta would be.
The only vaguely disappointing aspect of the trip was the fact that both the hippo pools we visited on our mokoro rides were empty when we were there. Any disappointment I might have felt however, disappeared a week or so later when Darlington told us about a delta trip that he'd been on a couple of years earlier. Apparently the group had only just left the mokoro station on day one when he heard a scream behind him. As he was in one of the last three boats, he turned around to see what was happening and so was able to watch as a hippo charged and snapped the mokoro behind him in two, tipping two of his clients into the water in the process. He jumped in to help them(!) and then saw that the hippo had realised that it hadn't quite finished the job and had started to charge towards the three of them again! It was only the quick thinking of the woman poler in the final boat - who used her pole to attack the hippo and so gave the others enough time to climb back into the remaining mokoros - which saved their lives. That's definitely NOT the kind of close encounter I was hoping for - and I'm very glad that I only heard the story AFTER I'd already been to the delta and gone swimming in the waterways - I guess ignorance really is bliss!
During the night (as I lay in my comfy bed) I listened to what I assumed were elephants grunting and eating their way around our camp - fortunately I fought the temptation to go outside to try to sneak a peek at them because, as I learnt the next morning, the grunting wasn't actually elephants - turns out it was one of the resident leopards coming to check out our temporary camp!
While we were in Chobe we also went on an evening cruise on the Chobe river, which runs between Namibia and Botswana. From the river boat we saw a bird of prey clutching some kind of giant, wriggling fish in its talons, plenty of buffalo, crocs and baboons hanging out on the banks, and large groups of hippos wallowing in the shallow pools and seemingly climbing all over each other. Although we could generally only see their heads above the water, up close you get a real sense of how overwhelmingly ginormous they are - there's no way I'd ever have been able to wrap my arms around their necks even if I'd wanted to and/or been stupid enough to get that close! One of the highlights of this particular boat ride was finally seeing (and capturing on film) a hippo yawning... although one of the more interesting things I learned from the captain of our trip - hippos don't actually yawn, instead it seems that they're warning you to back off or they'll charge - there's a mistake I'd rather avoid making!
From Chobe we had a long drive to Maun, the starting point for our trip into the Okavango Delta. Early the following morning we headed out to the mokoro station and met our polers. A mokoro is basically a dug out canoe and, as the name suggests, the polers stand at the back of boat and use long wooden poles to manoeuvre them through the delta's waterways. As a passenger in a mokoro, you sit extremely low in the water and this basically means that you're eye level with hundreds upon thousands of water lilies as you drift through the larger pools, and that reeds tower above you (and tend to smack you in the face!) as you rush through some of the narrower streams.
We spent a couple of nights camping on one of the larger islands in the delta. While there we went on game walks and mokoro rides in the mornings and evenings, and managed to get up close and personal with elephants grazing, zebras crossing waterways and some gruesome carcass remains from leopard and lion kills. During the walks, our guides also introduced us to the "small five" - ant lion, red billed buffalo weaver, rhino beetle, leopard tortoise and elephant shrew. It was too hot in the middle of the day to do anything and so we'd hang out at the camp instead - either following the shade as it moved across the site, or cooling off in the local swimming hole.
The highlight of the trip, as is so often the case, was definitely the people we met while we were there. There was Brave, our poler, who was training to be a guide and seemed to know the name and habits of every bird/frog/animal we saw or heard along the way. And Judge, who was a giant of a boy and had a tendency to grunt like a gorilla as he drank his morning coffee, but who was also very good natured and would erupt into fits of giggles after he'd swum underwater and grabbed someone's leg - usually Simon's - making them jump and scream at the thought that there were crocs and/or hippos in our swimming hole. And finally there was Reuben... here, words fail me, so I'm going to use some of his own: "I'm a white man in a black man's skin [from getting sunburnt one afternoon apparently] and I have a small head but a big brain... that's so big my head hurts"!
On our final night in the delta we played games with the guides and polers - things like "Simon says" but in their local language (I got down to the last three but wasn't good enough to see off Reuben or Judge) and that drinking game (minus the alcohol) where you each pick an animal name and then use it to move turns around the group, trying to trip people up along the way ("elephant, elephant - warthog, warthog", "warthog, warthog - lion, lion"...). The locals put us to shame in the singing department as well - they pretty much put on a half hour show of amazing singing and dancing for us - and we couldn't even manage the hokey pokey in return. Disappointing effort on our part!
A few of us finished off our delta experience with a half hour scenic flight over the region. The landscape is incredible and from the air you get a much better sense of just how expansive it is. It was also a real buzz seeing hippos grazing on land for the first time of the trip, and herds of elephants playing in the waterways. We also saw some giraffe and buffalo which we hadn't managed to spy during our game walks and mokoro rides, which was pretty cool as I hadn't realised before the trip how abundant and varied the wildlife (as opposed to the plant and bird life) in the delta would be.
The only vaguely disappointing aspect of the trip was the fact that both the hippo pools we visited on our mokoro rides were empty when we were there. Any disappointment I might have felt however, disappeared a week or so later when Darlington told us about a delta trip that he'd been on a couple of years earlier. Apparently the group had only just left the mokoro station on day one when he heard a scream behind him. As he was in one of the last three boats, he turned around to see what was happening and so was able to watch as a hippo charged and snapped the mokoro behind him in two, tipping two of his clients into the water in the process. He jumped in to help them(!) and then saw that the hippo had realised that it hadn't quite finished the job and had started to charge towards the three of them again! It was only the quick thinking of the woman poler in the final boat - who used her pole to attack the hippo and so gave the others enough time to climb back into the remaining mokoros - which saved their lives. That's definitely NOT the kind of close encounter I was hoping for - and I'm very glad that I only heard the story AFTER I'd already been to the delta and gone swimming in the waterways - I guess ignorance really is bliss!
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