Botswana

We didn’t have a lot of time for Bostwana, and hiring a car wasn’t cheap, so we limited our stay to visiting the absolute highlights, Chobe National Park, and the Okavango Delta.  While both were amazing, perhaps most memorable will be how we got from Chobe to Maun in the Okavango, but I’m getting ahead of myself; I’m trying to be sequential here.  

We crossed the boarder with a minimum of fuss, and arrived in the small town outside of Chobe National Park to stay the night.  Chobe proved to be the quickest tour for a national park, but also one of the most impressive.  We booked ourselves onto a sunset boat cruise which covered a tiny area of the park, but the boat allowed us to get the closest to game and see more than anywhere else.

Without a hire car, to move from Chobe to Maun consisted of two very squishy local buses (fortunately with no movies).  However all was not lost because two very nice French Canadian’s happend to be going the same way as us, so we had someone else to talk to, always nice.  Even better, while waiting for the second bus, three crazy Russians approached us, said they felt sorry for us, and offered us a lift.  Yes the car was a seven seater so technically we would all fit, but we were all travelling, so you need to account for bags.  Mark’s backpack is 90 litres.  He can fit a small couch into it.  His ‘day bag’ is the size of most people’s backpacks.  While I have a small backpack, and a medium sized day back, together they take up more room than we do.  We ended up with bags at our feet, sitting on bags, bags on our laps, bags on those bags and a tiny air circle.  Our driver also had a lead foot, so we tended to move at about 180km/hr.  It was uncomfortable!  It was also the best road trip I’ve been on in ages as we attempted conversation with various English levels, and various abilities to breathe.  That evening in Maun proved to be equally entertaining; Russians can party.

Feeling slightly worse for wear, the next morning with Geneviève and Kevin (the French Canadian couple) we set off on a Mokoro trip into the Okavango.  A Mokoro is a canoe like boat that was used to get around the Okavango Delta, a swamp in the northern part of Botswana.  We piled our bags, camping gear, cooking equipment and enough food to last us three nights and set off. 

What to say about the Mokoro trip.  Well it was HOT in the Okavango.  This meant we basically found whatever shady spot we could, and lay in it between 10am and 4pm.  Also we were really roughing it, so no showers and a proper camp toilet consisting of a hole in the ground.  Also because it was so hot, we were drinking about 5 litres of water a piece.  That wasn’t something we’d catered for, so we ended up having to boil swamp water (ok the swamp water was pretty clean, but there were still bits in it). 

Having said all of that, it was a great deal of fun.  We’d go fishing in the evenings; we’d laze in the water during the day (hoping no croc passed looking for a tasty morsel); we ate some pretty amazing meals, including the fish Mark managed to catch; we’d go on game walks in the mornings and evenings spotting herds of zebra’s, elephant, buffalo, warthog, baboons and millions of birds. 

We discovered new and wonderful uses for dried elephant poo as well.  Too many mozzies at night?  Burn elephant poo and smoke them away.  Monkeys try to steal food from your camp?  Throw elephant poo at them (burning poo optional).  Herd of elephants walk through your camp over night and worried about getting squished?  Throw aforementioned smoking poo at them.  Husband needs to be put into place?  Elephant poo fight!

While I think all four of us enjoyed the Delta, the feeling of opening the eskie (cooler box) of the boat taking us back to Maun and finding ice cold bottles of water, beer and soft drinks was pretty euphoric.  So was stepping into the shower and washing that swampy water, smokey-elephant smell from my hair!!!

From Maun we went to Windhoek in Namibia with another lead foot 180km/hr driver.  Yes Mum we wore seatbelts!