Botswana has been a wonderful experience. We started with being upgraded from our booked accommodations to a beautiful huge Lodge on the Chobe River. Went for a river cruise in the afternoon until sunset and saw all sorts of amazing animals coming to the river to drink. We had the pleasre of being told off by a young bull elepant who ran along the bank trumpeting at us, nice to see when you are safe on a riverboat lol :) The sunset was beautiful and getting a red sun shining through a gnarly old tree feels like perfection.
Please forgive the lack of photos at this point, I have to find a way to make them small before uploading to the blog as the usual uploader doesn't work and it takes ages to do it all. We are going from 6 in the morning until 10 or so at night so there is not a lot of spare time. Not complaining, we are loving the fullness of the days, but no time to be on this blog. It is now 5.30am and we are in Maun at a Lodge with internet.
The next few days we transfered into a new open top vehicle and a new guide called Keobagelee or KB for short. In Botswana guiding has to be done by a local in order to make sure that there is as many empoyment possibilities as possible which is a great idea. We also had a team of 5 workers who put up tents and cooked for us over these 4 days. Botswana has only about 2 million people and is much larger than NZ, it is a developing nation with it's main industries being diamonds and tourism.
Our camps were set in National Parks, tents in a circle around a campfire with game walking past while we slept at night. One night a hyena cackled so close by and loudly that it woke me up. Other nights I have just lain there and listened to all the wonderful sounds, I especially love the low rumble of the elephants. I wish I had spent a little time listening to African animal sounds before coming on the tour so I could know what I was listening to. In the evenings Kathy our cook would come and call to us in a high trilling call, it was great to hear but unfortunately on the first night one of our group (who shall remain nameless) glorified the moment by stating loudly - Oh what an awful sound! You can imagine how we all felt and hoped Kathy hadn't heard.
KB took us to see all sorts of game and we saw a leopard in a tree with his freshly killed impala, that will be one for the wall. We saw all sorts of antelope and mongoose. There are less birds here but some old favorite storks and the lovely Lilac Breasted Roller (see Andrew, I remembered!). The Roller has beautiful blue wings that you can see when it flies. We got to see a wild dog pack including puppies which was very special. We watched a pride of lions set up to catch a wildebeast but failed, fantastic to watch their strategies.
Today we are in Maun, next a couple of days on the Okavango Delta then back to Maun again.
