Upington, South Africa, October 9th
We have been lingering here in
Upington for a few days now as our first loop around Southern Africa nears its
end next week. I probably should have
written more blog posts, but there always seems to be something else that needs
doing. We only left Botswana a week ago,
and we already miss it. It was such an
amazing country to travel through that I think I will split the blog post about
it into two or three bite-sized chunks, rather than one huge War and
Peace-style omnibus edition.
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Chobe, the greatest collection of elephants in Africa
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Entering Botswana from Zambia on
Friday, September 2nd was like moving between two separate
worlds. On the Zambian side, all is
chaos and unpleasant touts and hassle.
Once on the ferry, peace returns and the Botswanan side of the border is
quiet and orderly and efficient. It took
very little time (and much, much less money than was the case in Zambia) for us
to pay for our Temporary Import Permit and third-party car insurance. A quick shopping stop in downtown Kasane and
we were settling into our campsite just outside town, Kwalape Lodge.
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| It's heartening to see lots of baby elephants in Chobe |
We had heard horror stories about
how hard it was to get camping reservations in Botswanan national parks, and
how we wouldn’t be allowed into the parks without reservations. We had ended up paying quite a lot of money
for camping reservations for 9 days around Chobe National Park and Moremi Game
Reserve, with the plan being that we would drive the sandy track linking the
two. The plan was to spend 4 nights
camped on the Chobe River in a couple of campsites not far outside the national
park boundaries, then have a long, hard day of driving to get to Moremi Game
Reserve, where again we would camp just outside and do day trips into the
reserve. It was kind of a goofy
itinerary, dictated by the impossibility of getting camping reservations at the
key stopover campsite of Savuti, or indeed at any public campsite in Chobe or
Moremi.
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| Kudu buck running beside the Chobe River |
The trip started out well, with a
day spent driving through the Riverfront sector of Chobe National Park, where
we had spent a memorable 24 hours back in March along with a party of Japanese
high school students on a humanitarian service trip at the Olive Tree Learning
Centre in Livingstone. Chobe is, to my
mind, the single most impressive collection of big game in all of Africa. The banks of the Chobe River, a tributary of
the Zambezi, are thick with huge herds of game:
red lechwe, impala, zebras, buffalo, kudu, waterbucks and, especially,
elephants in prodigious numbers. Plenty
of predators stalk this food supply, and the birdlife is awesome. We were looking forward to a repeat
performance this time around.
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| Giraffes just don't look graceful bending over to graze! |
We left our campsite by 8:15 and
by 9:15 we had entered Chobe, having paid for 5 days’ entry. All we had heard about not being allowed into
the park without accommodation vouchers proved to be inaccurate; the national
park folks weren’t at all fussed about where we were staying, and were very
welcoming to day visitors. We turned
down towards the river, then proceeded through huge numbers of elephants, along
with big herds of giraffes, impala and zebra.
There was even a big herd of sable antelope, the species which we had
searched for in vain in Kasanka (northern Zambia) a month before. The landscape had changed; it hadn’t rained
for five months, and the bush was tinder dry away from the river. Almost all the animals in the park seemed to
be out on the riverbank, grazing on the grass and drinking the water.
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| Sable antelope at last! |
The birdlife was certainly less
numerous than it had been in March, when thousands of migratory birds were
present, but there were still lots and lots of species, particularly waders,
egrets and herons. There were
pink-backed and great white pelicans (both new for us), several types of
storks, spur-winged and Egyptian geese, red-billed teal, spoonbills, African
and lesser jacanas (the latter a new species for us) and many more. As always, there were so many species, and so
many individual animals, that it felt like trying to drink from a firehose. We spotted three well-fed lions lying
comatose under a tree, with four other game drive vehicles clustered around;
sleeping lions are not the most interesting of subjects, so we soon gave up and
headed further along the river.
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| Roan antelope out for a jog, Chobe |
Towards early afternoon, after
hours of happy photographing and bird-spotting, we finally reached the far
western end of the Riverfront sector and turned inland on a very sandy track to
do the last 5 km back to the paved road.
It was much, much sandier than anywhere else we had gone, so it wasn’t
surprising that we got ourselves thoroughly stuck in the sand, especially as we
hadn’t let as much air out of our tires as we should have. What was surprising, and a bit alarming, was
that when Terri put Stanley into low-range four-wheel drive, nothing happened: the wheels didn’t get any power at all, and
we just sat there with the engine revving.
To make it even more alarming, ominous squeaking and grinding noises
came from the gears. We put it in
high-range four-wheel drive and I started digging, but before we could get
ourselves out, a game drive vehicle came from the other direction and very
kindly offered to pull us out. We pulled
out our towing strap, and within a couple of minutes, we were free. Terri drove very carefully up to the gate and
the pavement, and we crawled the 18 km to Mwandi View, a beautiful little
campsite on the banks of the Chobe River run by a personable South African
named Anton.
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| An impala utterly unfazed by our presence |
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Mwandi View was really a lovely
place to stay, with abundant birdlife and sweeping views over the river into
Namibia; sunset was spectacular, not just because of the great coppery flames
of colour reflected on the river, but also because of the astronomical numbers
of quelea birds flying back to their roosts for an hour around dusk. Silhouetted against the red sky and the sun’s
elongated disk, they darkened the sky in a continuous dense undulating stream,
hundreds passing every second. It was
one of the most awe-inspiring sights of a trip that has been big on awe. Queleas, a little finch, are the most
numerous wild bird species on earth (with about 7 billion individuals, only
domestic chickens live in greater numbers) and we had seen them before, but
never in such prodigious profusion. We
sat there watching the sky slowly fade to black with a crescent moon near to
Venus, and Jupiter closer to the horizon.
It was a place of sublime natural beauty, and it was hard to tear
ourselves away to eat dinner.
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| Quelea darkening the sky at Mwandi View |
The next day we were up early,
breakfasting quickly on coffee, tea and rusks (the South African standby quick
breakfast) and driving back towards the park by 7:10. By 7:30 we were in the park, with Terri
successfully navigating the sands that got us stuck the day before. We kept Stanley in high-range 4WD and it
seemed to work fine, especially with the tires further deflated to just over
1.0 bar of pressure. There were no
predators to be seen, but there was a huge herd of buffalo enveloped in a cloud
of dust, a big herd of roan antelope, and a big male sable antelope looking
majestic with his long, curving horns silhouetted against the sky.
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| Buffalo herd in Chobe |
Kudu and waterbuck mingled with impala and
lechwe on the river plains. There were
lots of southern carmine bee-eaters, one of my favourite bird species with its
brilliant red colours, and a few little bee-eaters with blue and green in place
of red. There were lots of fish eagles
patrolling over the river, and little sandpipers along the banks. Finally at 9:45 we stopped at a hilltop
lookout to cook up a more substantial brunch of bacon, eggs, toast and fried
tomatoes, looking out over huge herds of zebras below. Commercial safari vehicles stopped by with
their passengers, many of them paying many hundreds of dollars a day, and some
of the passengers cast covetous eyes on our fry-up as they had tea and
cookies.
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| Terri and Stanley at our hilltop breakfast site |
Replete, we headed back out in
search of animals, heading away from the river to explore some inland
routes. It really wasn’t worth the
effort, as the tinder-dry bush was bereft of game except for a handful of
elephants. As we bumped downhill back towards the river, a new sound began
underneath Stanley, a grinding, clashing, squeaking noise that we couldn’t
locate. It sounded like a broken bearing
in one of the front wheels. Lots of
Terri driving slowly while I walked along listening and looking didn’t show
definitively what was wrong, so we gave up, watched giraffe and roan antelope
for a while, then drove cautiously back through the sands to the gate and on to
Mwandi View, worried about what was wrong with Stanley. At higher speeds, the noise went away, but as
soon as we slowed down or turned sharply, it returned. We saw another magnificent male sable crossing the road close to Mwandi View: what an imposing creature!
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| The deep sandy track that injured Stanley |
Back at Mwandi View, we took
counsel from Anton and from some of our fellow campers as to what might be
going on. The consensus was that we
might had gravel stuck in a brake pad making the squeaking noise, but that
something more dire might be going on in 4WD low-range. We called Ken Webster, a mechanic in Kasane,
who said that he was going to be in the area the next day and could come check
out whether it was safe for us to keep driving.
We had another breath-taking sunset and quelea display, then barbecued
our steaks at Anton’s excellent riverside braai setup under the stars while
Anton regaled us with tales that had us in stitches. We went to bed in a jovial mood but worried
what Ken Webster might find the next morning.
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| Quelea silhouetted against a Mwandi View sunset |
It took Ken quite a while to deal
with the other vehicle that he had come to rescue just up the river, and we sat
at Mwandi View looking out over the river, walking along to do some bird (and
hippo) watching, and sorting through the hundreds of photos from the previous
two days. When Ken finally arrived, he
had a look and a listen, and diagnosed that even in high range, our four-wheel
drive wasn’t working at all, and that the squeaking noise was probably coming
from the gear box and transfer case. We
arranged to drop the car off at his garage in Kazangula the next morning, and
drove off to our new campsite, a few kilometres up the river at Muchenje. Muchenje proved to be another good-value
well-run campsite, although the views over the Chobe River weren’t as perfect
as at Mwandi. We decided not to go game
driving, and spent the afternoon relaxing in camp, watching birds and chatting
with our neighbours, a German couple whom we had met on the Kazungula ferry
three days earlier. They told us about
once discovering that there was no oil in their transfer case after having work
done on it in a garage in Zambia. We
listened and thought something like “luckily nothing like that would happen to
us!”. Terri and I spent some time on the
internet trying to research what might be ailing a Mitsubishi Colt, but it was
a slow, intermittent connection and we didn’t learn much for the investment of
a couple of hours. I made a beef curry
for supper, then we sat and watched another great sunset and another flight of
queleas before playing guitar and packing up for an early-morning departure.
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| Buffalo crossing the road in a cloud of dust, Chobe |
Tuesday, September 6th
was a long day but a good day. We were
awake by 6 and packed up and driving by 7, taking the paved transit road
through the park straight to Kasane, arriving at Ken Webster’s garage by 8:15,
even before he had arrived. We dropped
Stanley off to be investigated, took out our folding bikes and rode the 9 km
back into Kasane to make use of our day without a car to do a boat trip on the
Chobe River. We used Kalahari Tours, the
outfit that Terri has used for a decade for her student trips, and since we
already had park permits for the day, it only cost about US$ 14 per person, a
tremendous deal.
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| African skimmer in flight |
The boat trip was as fantastic as
we had hoped. Although the bird life
wasn’t as overwhelming as it had been back in March, there were still lots and
lots of species, including the African skimmer, a very pretty, fairly rare and
(for us) new species. There were big
herds of red lechwe, big herds of elephants and (very sadly) a dying elephant
lying in a puddle of water; our guide said he had been wounded by poachers,
possibly across the river in Namibia, and that he was expected to die that
day. Other elephants stood around him,
splashing him with water and, in the case of a very young elephant, lying down
beside him. As the other elephants
eventually moved off, we heard them vocalizing, and it sounded very much like
humans crying, which is very much what we wanted to do. Botswana has been the biggest, safest sanctuary
for elephants during the blood-soaked past ten years during which Africa’s
elephant numbers have plummeted by 25%, as documented in the recent Great
Elephant Census, but now poaching is starting to nibble at the edges of
Botswana’s safe zone. Some 19 elephants
have been poached near or inside Chobe in the past couple of months, despite
Botswana’s strict anti-poaching shoot-to-kill policies.
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| Dying elephant with distressed comrades beside him |
We spent a bit of time rescuing a
boatload of Korean tourists whose pontoon had run aground in the shallows,
before visiting more hippos, crocodiles and waterbirds. The whole time we were on the boat, I felt as
though I was in a BBC Nature documentary narrated by David Attenborough, with
new wonders of nature around every bend in the river. It was a perfect way to spend the day while
Stanley underwent his checkup.
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Helmeted guineafowl at Chobe
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We returned to shore around noon,
and cycled off for lunch at the Chobe Safari Lodge. Terri was feeling unwell, so I left her there
to rest while I cycled back to Kazungula to pick up Stanley. Ken said that it was safe to drive Stanley to
Maun the long, paved way around through Nata, but that he wasn’t able to solve
the gear-changing issue. He had checked
the transfer case, though, and found that it had not a single drop of oil in
it, so he suspected this was the root cause of all the problems. We thought back to our conversation of the
day before with the German couple and winced.
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Giraffes always look so supercilious!
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We phoned the agency which had
arranged our camping reservations, Mackenzie 4x4 in Maun, and managed to
re-arrange our camping dates for the coming days so that we didn’t completely
lose the expensive bookings.
Coincidentally, Ken Webster recommended Mac Mackenzie, of Mackenzie 4x4,
as the man to fix Stanley once we got to Maun.
At 4 pm, we drove out of Kasane along the paved road, past elephants,
giraffes and lots of tiny steenboks beside the road. We were outside the boundaries of Chobe
National Park, but it was still some sort of game reserve, and looked just as
wild (and just as dry!) as inside the park.
We nearly hit a black-backed jackal that darted in front of the car, and
had the same experience with a roan antelope.
There were lots of impalas, ground-hornbills, red-crested korhaans and
plenty of zebras. Just driving along the
highway, we were seeing significantly more game than we had seen in two days in
Kafue National Park in Zambia a few weeks before.
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| Contented young elephant at Elephant Sands |
We watched sunset from beside the
road, then drove on towards Nata in the gathering darkness, hoping for a place
to camp. Our GPS told us that there was
a place named Elephant Sands about 50 km before Nata, and we turned off
gratefully to camp there. It was a
popular place, and the reception area had lots of warnings of how to avoid
alarming the elephants. We didn’t see
any in the dark, but we could certainly hear them. Terri went to bed, still feeling unwell, but
I sat up writing a blog post and sorting through photos until the animal sounds
got more alarming; what sounded like a nearby lion roar sent me scuttling to
safety inside Stanley with great alacrity! (It turned out to be an elephant snuffling while drinking, amplified by the trunk being inside a water trough.)
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| Pachyderm skin, Elephant Sands |
We woke up to find ourselves in a
wonderful place the next morning.
Elephant Sands is a campsite/tented camp/cottage complex built around a
waterhole to which a dozen or more elephants come every day for water. They walk right through the campsite and
spend hours at the waterhole, drinking, bathing and socializing. We spent some time watching the elephants and
trying, vainly, to sketch them. Around
us were the students of the Travelling School, whom we had last seen at
Jollyboys Campsite in Livingstone; they were spending a week here doing
classes. We looked through their science
text, compiled by the teacher, and were impressed by the choice of topics
(ecology, wildlife behaviour, conservation) that could be directly related to
the experiential learning going on at Elephant Sands.
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| Elephant Sands, with the guest cottages right beside the waterho |
We drove into Nata, a dusty
crossroads, had a disappointing takeaway lunch, then headed out to the Nata
Bird Sanctuary, on the edge of the great Sowa Pan. Central Botswana was filled, millennia ago,
with huge inland lakes that have slowly dried over the years, leaving
seasonally flooded salt pans in their place.
Sowa Pan is part of the Makgadikgadi Pans complex, a huge, wild area
that is a favourite among hard-core 4x4 adventure enthusiasts. We wanted to have a tiny nibble of the pan to
get a feeling for whether it was an area that we wanted to return to. We drove into the bird sanctuary and along a
deserted track, past a few wildebeest and zebras, to find ourselves at the
shore of an extensive shallow lake. I
had thought that the pan would be dry in the middle of a drought, but there was
quite a bit of water, with a number of pelicans bobbing about. It was an unearthly, empty landscape that
hinted at the infinite, and I could see how exploring Sowa Pan could appeal to
lovers of wild spaces. On the way out,
we spotted a few ostriches and a distant secretarybird, along with larger herds
of zebras and wildebeest.
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| Terri and Stanley on the shores of Sowa Pan near Nata |
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| Ostrich seen between Nata and Maun |
We drove back to the main paved
road and zipped along towards Maun, passing more wildlife and the turnoffs to
the Makgadikgadi Pans and Nxai Pans National Parks. We got into the outskirts of Maun at the
exact moment that our main fan belt snapped.
It took us a while to figure out why our battery was losing voltage and
our engine was starting to overheat, but as we sat in the parking lot of an
Engen service station, Jake, a passing mechanic who was driving home from work,
rescued us and replaced the fan belt in the parking lot. We were relieved and impressed and after
paying him, we kept his number just in case we needed his services again in the
future. We made our way out of town to
Crocodile Camp only to find it had gone out of business, and we ended up at
Audi Camp, a well-run campsite about 10 km north of Maun.
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Jake replacing Stanley's fan belt in the Engen parking lot
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The next day we delivered Stanley
to Mac Mackenzie’s workshop to investigate what was going on with the
four-wheel drive. It took his mechanics
hours to open up the transfer case, which was completely seized up from the
lack of lubrication. Mac decided that
since it was going to take a long time, he would outsource the work to the
workshop of a friend of his, Mike.
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Stanley's saviours: Jake and one of Mackenzie 4x4's mechanics
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Since
it would likely take several days to deal with whatever the problem was, Mac
offered to rent us another 4WD, a Prado owned by his wife, to use in the
meantime. At $100 a day, it was pretty
expensive, but this is about a third of the going rate in Maun, so it was a
deal from our point of view. We still
had our accommodation bookings to use in the Moremi and Khwai area, and didn’t
want to spend days cooling our heels in Maun instead of seeing wildlife. We selected a small subset of gear from
Stanley and loaded it into our new substitute-Stanley. We borrowed a portable fridge from Mac,
borrowed a heavy canvas safari-tent from his son, took some cooking gear,
clothes and bedding from Stanley and returned to Audi Camp for the evening.
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Stanley's 4WD being inspected at Mackenzie 4x4
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The next day, Friday September 9th,
it took forever to get away from Maun, as we bought cables at an electrical
shop to run the fridge from the cigarette lighter in the Prado, went to an ATM
for cash, picked up our accommodation vouchers from Mackenzie 4x4, bought
groceries, picked up our fridge from Stanley to replace the one that Mac had
lent us (it stopped working an hour after driving away from his workshop the
day before) and generally ran errands.
We finally drove out of town by 1:30 pm, headed north towards the fabled
Okavango Delta. The road was perfect
asphalt for the first 30 km before turning into a sandy track. The Prado, much more powerful and lightly
loaded than Stanley, handled the sand with ease, especially with the tires
partially deflated. It took us a little
over an hour, driving fairly quickly, to get to Kaziikini Camp (where we would
spend the night) and then another hour to reach the South Gate of Moremi Game
Reserve. The park rangers gave us a
quizzical look when we said that we wanted a day ticket that late in the day,
but also gave us good tips on where to go with limited time (the Black
Pools). We asked about accommodation in
the park’s campsite at the South Gate, and were not surprised that, although it
was supposedly booked solid, there were tent sites available for the night if
we wanted them. As we’d paid for an
expensive tent site already at Kaziikini, we said no to the offer, and resigned
ourselves to a long drive back to camp after our game drive.
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A couple of tsessebe near Black Pools
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At first there was precious
little game in the dusty bush to justify our long drive into Moremi, but as we
got closer to the Black Pools and their life-giving water, there was suddenly a
profusion of game: red lechwe, our
first-ever tsessebe (a type of hartebeest), ostrich, secretarybirds and
zebras. As we beat a hasty retreat
towards the gate, trying to beat the 6:30 pm closing time, suddenly a large
feline shape crossed the track in front of us, and we realized that it was a leopard,
the first one that we had spotted entirely by ourselves. We sat and watched it
for a while, trying to get decent photos and admiring the powerful build and
surprisingly dark-coloured coat before reluctantly resuming our drive. We stopped beside the road halfway back from
the South Gate to Kaziikini to watch another brilliant African sunset, then
continued to our campsite, arriving in the dark. We passed a nightjar and a sandgrouse both
roosting on the sand of the road, and saw slender mongooses hurrying across the
track in front of us. In camp, as we
cooked, Terri spotted a couple of honey badgers wandering off into the bush; we
watched them for a while, trying to get photos, happy to have seen them until
we realized that they had quietly and efficiently pillaged our kitchen for
bread and sugar. We also discovered that our fridge didn't run well off the cigarette lighter in the Prado; so much for cold beer and fresh meat!
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Pearl-spotted owlet, Moremi South Gate
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We slept well and got up very
early the next day for a big day of game driving: our alarms went off at 5:20 and we were
driving back towards the South Gate by 6:20, fortified by hot tea and coffee
and dry rusks, the standard Afrikaner fast breakfast. By 7:10 we were back at the South Gate where
we saw a beautiful pearl-spotted owlet sitting on a road sign, and soon
afterwards we were headed into the park toward the recommended game-viewing
area of Xini Lagoon. It proved to be a
great choice, with dense clusters of herbivores eating the recently-burned
vegetation with its green shoots. We saw
big groups of red lechwe, impala, tsessebe, zebra, buffalo, waterbuck and
more. At the shrinking water pools, we
spotted lots of waterfowl skulking amongst the reeds.
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A wildebeest at full tilt near Xini Lagoon
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We returned to the main track and
continued towards Third Bridge, an almost mythical location that is about as
far northwest as you can drive into the Okavango along the Moremi Tongue of
land at a slightly higher elevation. At
the campsite there, we stopped and fried up steak and potatoes for a
substantial early lunch while we watched other vehicles brave the water
crossing at Third Bridge, where swamp water drains over the road at a spot
where slender logs have been laid to create a corduroy road surface. We had heard a few horror stories of people
getting stuck here, but after watching a few successful crossings, Terri had
figured out an optimal line to take without getting bogged down. We polished off our lunch and Terri hopped
into the driver’s seat to take us across the “bridge” without the slightest
problem. We were glad to have the power
and light luggage load of the Prado for this sort of water crossing.
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Red lechwe fleeing through the marsh at Paradise Pools
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Once on the other side, we drove a bit
further to Xakanaka and Paradise Pools, two areas that other tourists had raved
about. The scenery was spectacular, with
flooded plains dotted with massive trees, and red lechwe and waterfowl
frolicking in the water. It really felt
very prehistoric and peaceful and far from the madding crowds of the modern world. It was hard to tear ourselves away and drive
back along a different track, far from the waters of the delta and utterly
devoid of large or medium-sized animals.
By 5 pm we were back at Kaziikini, where we were one of only two couples
camped in the entire campground. We showered
(the shower areas were full of birds drinking from the drips of the shower
heads, including lots of pretty parrots), ate and were in bed early, tired by a
long but good day of wildlife viewing.
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Paradise Pools, Moremi
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Sunday, September 11th
found us driving 60 km north along a fairly good sandy track that the Prado
handled brilliantly, headed towards the Khwai River Community Nature
Conservancy via our new campsite of Dijara.
The track had been recently graded, and we sped along at 45-50 km/h
until just before Dijara, where we found the road blocked by deep water across
the road and floundered around looking for detours in the bush; after one track
petered out entirely, we found another, more heavily travelled route that
brought us out on the other side of the flood.
Dijara proved to be a scruffy little campsite with a great riverside
location, run by a pair of South African guys barely out of their teens. We set up our tent, cooked up some bacon and eggs and then drove
off 15 km down the road into the Khwai to see some animals.
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Impala drinking at Paradise Pools
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The Khwai River Community Nature
Conservancy is one of the unsung gems of northern Botswana. We had heard about it from tourists driving
the other way, and it lived up to its billing.
It’s a relatively small area, adjacent to the northeastern corner of the
much larger Moremi Game Reserve, and it shares the same low-lying landscape and
dense concentration of big game.
Technically, it is supposed to be open only to those people who camp at
the Khwai’s campsites, but those campsites, like the ones in Moremi and Chobe,
are booked up months in advance. In
practice, no effort is made to stop people like us camping just outside the
boundaries of the Khwai and then driving in to see the animals. Since no entrance fee is collected at the
gate, the experience is free, although I think most tourists would be glad to
pay a fee equivalent to that charged in Moremi.
All along the banks of the Khwai
River the green vegetation draws vast numbers of big animals from the bone-dry
surrounding bush. We spent the afternoon
meandering along the tracks beside the river, taking photos of large herds of
elephants, giraffes, kudu, waterbuck, impala, zebra and even a few common
reedbuck (our first since the Nyika Plateau in Malawi), while big pods of
hippos wallowed contentedly in the water.
There was a wealth of waterbirds to be seen as well, and the entire
atmosphere was one of peaceful tranquility in the Garden of Eden. It was hot, and after a while we rested
beside the track for an hour, sheltering in the shade of the Prado. Our late-afternoon game drive was productive,
yielding a leopard (seen at a distance across the river) and three contented
lions sleeping under a tree, seemingly undisturbed by the nine safari vehicles
clustered around them. We drove back to
Dijara along the road, stopping for roadside sundowners when the sunset caught
us still 10 kilometres from camp. We
fried up some vegetables with cheese, onion and bacon and fell asleep early.
We woke up a bit late (6:45) the
next day to the unwelcome discovery that Terri’s air mattress had sprung a
leak. We set off without breakfast back
towards Khwai, keen to make the most of the early morning coolness. Red-crested korhaans scuttled around in the
dry brush beside the road as we approached the Khwai, and groups of elephants
emerged from the bush to cross the road towards the river for a drink. Giraffe and kudu appeared beside the road
too, making the commute towards the Khwai more rewarding than our day of
game-viewing inside Kafue National Park a few weeks before.
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Imposing waterbuck male, Khwai
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Once inside the park, we drove
slowly along the river, past fewer animals than we had seen the previous
afternoon but still enough to be seriously impressive. We identified a new bird for us, the
long-toed plover, and watched a juvenile martial eagle beside the water,
looking improbably huge. We stopped to
cook up some oatmeal for breakfast beside a river crossing, one that we had
been warned about as being treacherous.
Once again Terri took notes on where commercial safari vehicles crossed,
checking out their line, and once breakfast was done, she drove across smoothly
and without incident, to her great relief.
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The Khwai leopards aren't shy about being seen!
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The other side of the river had more kudu and impala, but we quickly
spotted a cluster of safari vehicles not far from the crossing. Reasoning that seeing more than three safari
vehicles probably meant lions or leopards, we drove up to find a young female
leopard up a tree. We spent the next
hour watching the leopard as she climbed down out of her tree and up into
another, larger tree where she obligingly posed at the end of a branch while
dozens of camera shutters clicked furiously away. Terri got us into position when the leopard
started walking across open ground, and we had the leopard walk directly past
us at a distance of a few metres, giving us an unconcerned glance as she
finally cut into deeper bush and away from the gathered paparazzi. It was by far the longest and most
action-packed leopard encounter we had had, and it gave us the chance to take
some really high quality photos.
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You lookin' at me?
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This one meeting by itself would
have made our Khwai visit memorable, but there was more to come. We spent the heat of the day (the daily
temperatures had been climbing to uncomfortable levels ever since our arrival
in Botswana) in our camp chairs in the shade of the Prado beside the river,
watching nearby elephants and giraffes and waterbuck. We cooked up some lunch and I sorted through
photos, very happy with some of the images I had captured over the previous few
days. We chatted with a French couple in
a custom-built camper built on an Iveco truck; it was immaculate, perfectly
designed, well maintained and thoroughly out of our price range.
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Magnificent kudu buck showing off at Khwai
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That afternoon we drove along the
bank of the river, our progress agreeably halted by a herd of 25 elephants who
blocked the road. There were a couple of
tiny babies in the group, and we sat and watched them running along, full of
energy, trying to keep up with the long, slow pace of the adults. We eventually made it past the obstructive
elephants and recrossed the side channel, the Prado’s power and Terri’s
accurate route-finding making it seem trivial.
On the other side, kudu bucks came and displayed their magnificent
spiral horns and pelts, while waterbucks grazed in the water. Across the main river in Moremi, a lioness was
on the prowl and we watched her for a while through our binoculars. Our youthful camp operators in Dijara had
told us that none of their guests who visited Khwai had ever missed seeing a
lion or a leopard, and we had seen both great cats on both of our visits, proof
of the tremendous game viewing to be done in this little paradisiacal part of
the Okavango Delta. We ended a day of
unforgettable game viewing with one of the best sunsets of the trip, the sun
turning the river and its drowned trees the colour of molten copper. We drove back to Dijara in the gloaming,
overwhelmed by the beauty of the natural world.
The next morning, September 13th,
was my birthday, and we awoke in our borrowed tent to the sound of hippos and
plovers. We cooked up our remaining
bacon and eggs, packed up and drove back to Maun content with the four days of
world-class wildlife safaris we had had.
Stanley was on the mend, which was a great relief, and we used the Prado
one last time to buy groceries at our new favourite shop, Beef Boys, stocked
with top-notch meat, veggies and deli items.
We returned the Prado to Mac, glad to have been able to use him while
Stanley was out of action, and settled in for a few days in Maun.
As Terri
cooked up a feast at our digs at Laphroaig Cottages (without Stanley, camping
at Audi was expensive and impractical, so we found indoor accommodation in town),
we were glad that our first 12 days in Botswana had lived up to and exceeded
expectations. We looked forward to
further adventures in the central and southern parts of the country, hoping
that they could meet the impossibly high standard set by our travels through
Chobe, Nata, Moremi and Khwai, and thankful for being lucky enough to
experience all the Attenborough-esque wildlife that we had experienced. My 48th year had been a great one,
starting in Corsica and passing through Sardinia, Canada, the Falklands, South
Georgia, the Antarctic Peninsula, Patagonia, the Carretera Austral, Paraguay,
Uruguay, Buenos Aires, Zambia and now four and a half months of travelling in
Stanley around southern Africa. I hoped
that my 49th year would be just as idyllic.
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| Sunset at Khwai |
