Zambia: A Journey of Two Halves

 

Kapishya Hot Springs, Zambia (completed at Lake Shore Lodge, Kipili, Tanzania)

Terri and I are sitting between a swiming pool and a river here at idyllic Kapishya Hot Springs, one of our favourite spots from our 2016-17 edition of Stanley's Travels. We are planning to spend a couple of days here before starting the drive north to Tanzania, and it seems as good a place as any to take stock of our time in Zambia so far, which has been sharply divided between almost three weeks spent in one spot (Livingstone), followed by a couple of weeks of moving northward and seeing sights along the way. 

Our Livingstone Interlude

Our time in Livingstone was not at all focused on travel or seeing the sights. Livingstone is familiar territory to me, and even more so to Terri, who has been coming to Livingstone regularly for the past 15 years. She first came in 2007 to scout out the possibilities of running a service trip for students from Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS), the school at which she was teaching. She found a worthwhile project, at Olive Tree Learning Centre (OTLC), and brought students from KLAS to OTLC almost every year for a decade. The students would spend much of the academic year fundraising and preparing for the trip, which was a very intense week-long immersion in the reality of building up a school in one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods of Livingstone, the township of Ngwenya. For many of the Japanese students on the KLAS team, it was a life-changing experience, opening their eyes to the hardships and challenges that children in much of the developing world face.

One of our young stars

I was on the final KLAS student trip to OTLC in 2016, and have visited several times since then. When KLAS stopped sending student trips, funding the school became a much bigger challenge which has occupied a great deal of Terri's time and energy and focus over the past six years. Because of the covid pandemic, it had been three and a half years since Terri had last been to Livingstone, so there was a lot of catching up to do. The school has expanded steadily since its inception as a pre-school with 15 pupils, and in 2021 it graduated its first grade 7 class, sending most of them off to high school, an outcome that most parents would not have dreamed of a decade ago. OTLC now has 420 students, and is in constant flux, building new classrooms, hiring new teachers and trying to incorporate technology into the classroom. It's a constant struggle finding funding, although this past year has seen a big uptick in the number of people from around the world willing to sponsor an OTLC student for US$10 a month (click here if you might be interested in joining them). 

Class performance of poetry

This time around both Terri and I were struck by the maturity and eloquence of some of our students, especially compared to my first visit six years ago. It's gratifying to see that all this effort and fund-raising is paying off in terms of successful outcomes for our young learners.

Wonderful Zambian flag outfit

We also had a team of visitors from the United States drop into OTLC, bearing some welcome educational supplies. Brian Bohne, the team leader, is a friend of ours who has worked in Leysin at the LAS summer school several times, and who visited us in Georgia back in 2018. He brought three of his high school friends from Minnesota, along with his son Bryce and a Zambian friend, and the OTLC students and staff pulled out all the stops to give performances of song, dance and poetry. It was a high-energy, memorable day, and left our visitors with unforgettable memories.

Brian Bohne and his team of volunteers with some OTLC folks 

Our time in Livingstone flew by, and before we knew it almost three weeks had passed. There were a lot of bureaucratic steps to be endured to bring the school's structure up to date with the Zambian authorities, new classrooms to be commissioned, meetings with the school's headmistress and business manager to hash out future plans for the school, and a long-simmering deal to buy another piece of land for the school's future development. When we weren't scrutinizing budgets or making sure that sponsors were receiving reports on how their children. were doing, Terri and I managed to get out to a local gym fairly regularly to do some weightlifting, or visited 10th the Royal Livingstone Hotel to enjoy sunset over Victoria Falls. 

Gift, one of the sixth graders

We also nipped over the border to visit the Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls, which I had never seen before. We stayed with a Zimbabwean friend, Courtney, who showed us the community development project she is running, the Jafuta Trust; Terri and I were envious of the resources available to them to create a state-of-the-art community centre, with adult education, sewing and welding workshops and a well-engineered children's playground constructed largely out of old tires. 

We camped in the grounds of the Tabonina Bis guesthouse, a stately spot full of mature trees. Most of the time it was quiet, although it was used as a base for long rafting trips and was a hubbub of activity inbetween for a few days. We got used to our base in the middle of Livingstone, and it was hard to pry ourselves away from it on November 10th.

Back on the Road

We drove out of Livingstone mid-morning on Thursday, November 10th, and in retrospect it would have been a good idea to leave earlier in the day. It was a fairly uneventful trip most of the way, through dry, sparsely-inhabited countryside at first, but eventually passing through greener, more agriculturally productive areas until we joined the main road from Harare, Zimbabwe. At this point traffic got a lot heavier and we crawled into town slowly in a mass of heavy transport trucks. As we got into the city the roads got more and more congested and we were stuck in the worst traffic jams of our trip so far. It took hours to crawl through town and out the other side to our guesthouse, and we arrived in pitch blackness, tired and irritable from dealing with big-city traffic. We ordered a pizza and were in bed very quickly.

We spent all of Friday running errands in Lusaka, and much of Saturday morning as well. We were successful in most of our tasks, with the major achievements being obtaining COMESA car insurance for all the countries north of Zambia, and getting our malfunctioning solar power system diagnosed and repaired. It turned out that there was a short circuit between the solar controller and the battery which had burned out the controller. We had a new controller installed and finally saw our solar panels start to recharge our battery, a relief as we will have mains electricity less and less frequently as we head north, leaving us dependent on our batteries.

We finally tore ourselves away from the prosperous shopping malls of Lusaka by mid-afternoon on Saturday, November 12th and drove north along a horrible highway. It was clogged with endless lines of heavy trucks headed north to the copper mines of the Zambian Copperbelt and of DRC's Katanga Province. The trucks had, over the years, deformed the road with their tires into a series of long ruts separated by high ridges, making for challenging driving. We were headed for Kabwe, but the heavy traffic slowed us down and we arrived in the dark, after a futile search for a camping spot on a local farm that we never found in the dark. The night was full of millions of flying termites who had erupted from the soil with the recent rains, and it made for eerie driving. We finally found a room at a roadside "lodge" (more of a motel) next to a truck parking area, gobbled down some goat stew and were in bed early, glad to be under a solid roof as a titanic downpour raged all night.

We awoke to find Stanley covered with discarded termite wings. We drove off, with less traffic but still the same terrible road surface, stopping from time to time to stock up on vegetables being sold beside the road; I was particularly excited by enormous mushrooms being sold by young children which we ended up grilling that evening. We also picked up 1.5 litres of delicious honey near Kapiri Mposhi; we had bought honey there six years ago and had spent years reminiscing about how good it was. I'm pleased to say that our memories were completely accurate: it's some of the tastiest, most floral honey I've ever had! At Kapiri Mposhi the road split, with truck traffic continuing north while we headed west on a blissfully smooth and open road. Just past Serenje the smooth pavement came to an end in a series of immense potholes, bringing progress back to a crawl. It was a relief to turn off the truck road and north towards Kasanka National Park, where we camped on the park boundary at the Community Education Centre.

Batty About Kasanka

I think this is a light-coloured sitatunga doe

We had spent time in Kasanka back in 2016, and had really enjoyed it. Kasanka is a small park lacking in lions and the rest of the Big Five, but rich in more obscure species such as the sitatunga antelope and the puku antelope. It also has some great campsites, and is small enough to explore thoroughly in a couple of days. We were excited to be there at the right time of year to witness the migration of millions of straw-coloured fruit bats who gather from all over Central Africa every year between October and December.

The bats seemed to rise from the horizon

We spent a while at the Wasa Lodge, birdwatching from their back terrace which overlooks Lake Wasa, before proceeding to our campsite at Kabwe. We set up camp, had a big lunch and then set off to see the bats. We had been told that they started to leave their roosts around 4 or 4:30 pm, but this proved to be untrue; the first bats started to fly overhead at around 6:00 pm. The initial individuals and small groups rapidly swelled, and within five minutes the sky, already losing light since the sun had set twenty minutes earlier, was further darkened by millions of bats flying overhead in unimaginable numbers. It seemed unreal, a trick of computer graphics, with bats seeming to rise out of the earth at the horizon in an infinite stream. It was an awe-inspiring spectacle, and we spent a long time just staring up in silence, before remembering to take photos and videos. The bats were mostly silent, but we could hear the wind over their wings, as they weren't that high above us. Just as we were reaching sensory overload, the numbers began to dwindle, and by 6:25 it was all over. A guide told us that GPS sensors attached to some bats have shown that on the average bats fly 50 km from the 1-square-kilometre Fibwe bat forest every night to feed, returning 50 km in the pre-dawn hours; some bats have been recorded as flying twice as far in a night. We drove back to camp in the dark, trying to spot some nocturnal species as we drove; we had to be satisfied with an elephant shrew.

Bats filling the sky

We had a lazy morning in camp the next day. Our campsite had a nice view out towards the Kasanka River and we could see dozens of puku, their reddish-gold coats shining in the sun. An elephant wandered by in the middle distance, but we couldn't see any of the shy and reclusive sitatunga antelope that are a Kasanka specialty. We went for a game drive in the afternoon and didn't see any sable antelope (our target for that day), although we saw lots of puku and an assortment of interesting birdlife, including a lovely African cuckoo, a woodland kingfisher, a racquet-tailed roller, some wooly-necked storks and a few saddle-billed storks. We were back in camp early, in time for sundown and a delicious steak dinner, before hitting the sack early in order to see the morning return flight of the bats.

Puku buck in full flight

Our alarm went off at 4:00 AM and by 4:18 we were driving towards the hide. The first light of dawn was already in the sky (sunrise was at around 5:15) and as we approached the bat forest, we realized we were too late at 4:50; the last bats were flying overhead as we were in the car, and by the time we had parked and walked to the viewing area, it was all over except for a few stragglers. It was disappointing (we should have gotten up at 3 AM, not 4!), but at least it gave us lots of time to look for sitatunga, the shy and hard-to-spot semi-aquatic antelope who are Kasanka's other attraction. We had seen two on our previous visit in 2016, but this time, driving along the Kasanka River, we saw two dozen or so. Most fled once they saw us, bounding into the water and hiding in the dense reeds, but we saw a number out grazing who didn't seem too bothered by us. We were able to see enough individuals that we could appreciate the wide range in coat colour from dark brown (almost black) to Bambi-coloured. The males are impressive with their twisted horns, while the babies we watched were amazingly agile, leaping through the water to keep up with their parents. We returned to camp satisfied with our sitatunga, if not our morning bat-watching.

Dark-haired sitatunga parents and their light-coloured offspring

Marvellous Mutinondo

From Kasanka we drove back south to the main truck route and its vehicle-swallowing potholes and incessant heavy-goods traffic. The road led through small roadside clusters of truck stops and bars, some of the poorest and most unappealing places we had yet seen in Zambia. Thankfully it was only 125 km or so before we turned off and found ourselves on a well-maintained dirt track leading to our next destination, Mutinondo Wilderness; it was so smooth that we didn't even bother to lower our tire pressures, which we do on almost all dirt roads for a smoother ride. Much sooner than expected we pulled into a lovely campground, popped up the roof and started exploring.

Sweeping views out over the plains from the top

Mutinondo was a place which I had heard a lot of good things about back in 2016, but we had been in a bit of hurry and hadn't visited then. It turned out to be a case of good things coming to those who wait. Mutinondo is a fabulous place to stay for anyone who likes the outdoors and either hiking or mountain biking. Started in 1995 by Lari and Mike, a Zambian couple who fell in love with this area and secured a lease on a huge block of wilderness. The area is covered with pristine miombo woodland, dotted with dambos (marshy open spaces) and granite monoliths that rise steeply above the forests, and dissected by pristine streams that carve through the landscape in a series of pools and small waterfalls. Lari and Mike have established some 60 km of signed walking trails that allow travellers to explore the area on foot completely independently. The forest is full of plants and birds; Lari has co-authored a two-volume book on the plant life of Mutinondo (a highly impressive labour of love), while it is also a bird- and butterfly-watching hotspot. There are no lions or leopards in residence, but there are lots of antelope, including roan and sable, as well as klipspringers who bound up the steep granite walls at the first sign of humans.

Atop a Mutinondo monolith

We ended up spending four full days at Mutinondo. It was a perfect spot for us to get some exercise after a week spent doing a lot of driving. We ended up climbing eight of the ten monoliths nearest the main lodge; they were steep and hard work in the humidity, but gave sweeping views across the landscape, which seemed to be an unbroken carpet of virgin forest, with almost no signs of human settlement. Mutinondo is part of a long wildlife corridor stretching from the Bangweulu Wetlands south through Kasanka towards Mutinondo and beyond to the wildlife meccas of North and South Luangwa National Parks. We felt privileged to have the chance to spend time in such a beautiful landscape, so little touched by human activity. 

Mayense, the highest of the Mutinondo peaks

In addition to hiking 15 km a day, we also spent some time paddling an old canoe along a long level stretch of river, through reedbeds and under overhanging trees, looking for kingfishers and other birds. When the light was right, it was almost painfully lovely, and we floated along in a haze of sensory overstimulation. We also ended every hike with a dip in one of the many swimming holes, adding to the sense of perfection.

Cooking in our potjie over the fire in Mutinondo

One our last full day in Mutinondo, we didn't try to hike too far or up too many peaks. Instead we broke out Terri's new guidebook to reading the signs and tracks of African animals. Using it we were able to identify tracks of sable antelope, the droppings of sable, roan, baboon, civet, white-tailed and yellow mongoose and klipspringer, as well as the diggings of mongoose and aardvarks. The forest floor was scarred by enormous numbers of aardvark dens and feeding sites where these nocturnal excavating machines had demolished termite mounds in search of food. It was an eye-opening experience and made us feel (for a few minutes) like experienced game trackers!

The campsite was well-designed as well; although there were a few other campers in residence, we were barely aware of their existence, sheltered as we were by trees. We watched the sunset almost every afternoon from the deserted bar perched atop a west-facing rock outcrop, and cooked on wood fires in our campsite, sitting out afterwards to sip wine and try to spot nocturnal birds and creatures (we managed to spot no fewer than four bushbabies (lesser galagos) on one memorable night walk). It was hard to pull ourselves away in order to continue our onward journey; Mutinondo will live on in our memories as one of our favourite spots in all of southern Africa.

A perfect swimming hole for the end of a hike

Hot Spring Haven at Kapishya

Our last major destination in northern Zambia was another old favourite from 2016, Kapishya Hot Springs. We drove our final stretch of the infernal truck route, dodging Tanzanian fuel tankers driven by homicidal maniacs, stopping for fuel and supplies in the small city of Mpika. We hadn't tanked up in Serenje when we had the chance, and had watched our needle steadily heading towards empty as we drove on through a long stretch of road devoid of gas stations; good thing that Stanley's fuel tank holds 150 litres of diesel! From Mpika we turned off onto the Old Great North Road, with fewer potholes and almost no traffic, before turning onto a rough track that leads 45 km to Kapishya.

Kapishya

Kapishya is a great place to camp, with good facilities (like electrical power, lacking at Mutinondo) and the bliss of hot springs in which we immersed ourselves several times a day. It's also a wonderful place to birdwatch, with Ross' Turaco the most spectacular species. Mostly, though, we took a few days to edit videos for our YouTube channel, trying to get several weeks ahead of the game and use the decent wifi to upload our finished products. It worked well, as we are now a month ahead and are getting into the groove of editing.

Running For The Border

From Kapishya, from which we pried ourselves after four nights, it was time to get serious about reaching the Tanzanian border before Terri's visa ran out (I had extra days from going to Zimbabwe one day for some money-changing, and having my visa reset for another thirty days). It was a long slog back to the Old Great North Road and then north to the major city of Kasama for some resupplying (it even had a Shoprite supermarket, something we hadn't seen since Kapiri Mposhi) before carrying on to the final town in Zambia, Mbala. We stayed indoors at a small lakeside lodge (Lake Chila Lodge), then set off the next morning for a 20-kilometre rumble along a gravel road to a tiny border crossing at Kasese. We were nervous at the crossing since we had recently discovered that both of us had had our most recent yellow-fever vaccination more than ten years ago. In theory this meant that we could get rejected from entering Tanzania, but we were in luck: the immigration guy checking health records only looked at the outside of our little yellow booklets and of our covid vaccination records, checked our temperatures, and then let us go. Phew! We now need to find someplace to get another yellow fever jab since we probably won't get so lucky at future border crossings!

Final Thoughts on Zambia

So much of what we did during our five weeks in Zambia was revisiting familiar haunts, although Mutinondo was a wonderful new revelation. Zambia is always fun to visit, although it's definitely more expensive than the countries further south like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Parts of the country are quite prosperous, especially along the central transport corridor running from the Zimbabwe border north to Lusaka and continuing towards the Copperbelt; big commercial farms are interspersed with smallholder plots who all seem to be prospering growing for the market. Lusaka is a thriving city (with terrible traffic jams!) that has so much more prosperity than anywhere else in the country. Livingstone seems much less thriving in comparison, although Ngwenya township is definitely less desperately impoverished than it was when Terri started working with OTLC fourteen years ago. Northern Zambia is still noticeable less developed than the rest of the country, but it also hosts jewels like Kasanka and Mutinondo. 

The new government of Hikainde Hichilema (HH) seems to have turned the mood of Zambia in a more positive direction than the tired old corrupt regime of Edgar Lungu, but life is still a struggle for many poorer Zambians like the parents of OTLC students. 

One thing that we would love to see would be a concerted effort to repair the asphalt highways which have been systematically destroyed by the pounding of truck tires since our last visit in 2017. Driving the main highway from Lusaka to Tanzania is a miserable and dangerous experience, and we were overjoyed to escape from it to cross the border at Kasese rather than the main border post at Nakonde.

We might well be back in Zambia in a few months unless Ethiopia changes its crazy rules about driving one's own vehicle into the country. If so, we will visit the one great attraction that remains on our Zambia to-see list: South Luangwa National Park. We shall see; much can change in a few months.

Embracing YouTube

 Livingstone, October 26

D-Day from Cape Town!

Just a quick post here to try to convince you to watch our Stanley's Travels YouTube channel. We decided before resuming Stanley's Travels that we would embrace YouTube and try producing our own video this time. I'm used to taking photographs, but video was a foreign country to me up until now. Luckily Terri is a keen YouTube watcher and has schooled me on what is needed to produce a good, enjoyable video. We've been hard at work (video editing takes far more time than photo editing!) and have finished a number of videos so far, covering the run-up to the trip, our time in Cape Town, our trip to Hermanus and Agulhas and now (finally!) our definitive departure from Cape Town headed north.  Please give the videos a watch, like, subscribe, comment and tell your friends! It would be sad for us to make these videos and have almost nobody watch them.

The road north across the Karoo

                       

The purple flowers that lined the road north

                             

So click here to watch our latest video (driving north out of Cape Town towards the Kalahari) or else click here to find our channel. And stay tuned: new episodes should drop weekly, on Wednesday mornings (European time).

The flowering desert

                             

 

Sociable weaver nests weighing down the power lines

                             

Our first night in Stanley in over 4 years!

                            

Ambling Through Northern Botswana

Terri on the edge of Ntwetwe pan

 

Livingstone, Zambia

Stanley camped at Tabonina 

We have left behind Botswana and entered the third country of our trip, Zambia. We are camped in the gardens of the lovely Tabonina Bis guesthouse, under huge shade trees, catching up on admin as we have good internet connections and will be in town for a couple of weeks, working with the community-based elementary school that Terri has been developing for the past 15 years, Olive Tree Learning Centre. So it's a good time to catch up on blogging.

White-backed ducks

When I last wrote, we had just arrived in Drifters Camp, outside Maun. (By the way, in addition to the Google Map embedded in this post, you can check our position in real time using the cool Polarsteps app, which is a neat way of allowing people to follow our journey; you can just use the website, rather than having to sign up for the app.) We spent a couple of leisurely days at Drifters, watching the abundant birdlife in the Boteti River, swimming in the pool, doing workouts using our gymnastic rings (which we suspended from some massive tree branches), writing blog posts and editing and uploading YouTube videos for our channel. (Have you checked out our YouTube channel, Stanley's Travels, yet? If not, please click here!!)

Golden-tailed woodpecker

Pachyderm water bandits

It was hard to drag ourselves away from the genteel surroundings of Drifters and head back out on the road on October 12th. It was a short and easy drive (a welcome change from grinding through the Kgalagadi sands!) to Planet Baobab, 175 km east near the town of Gweta. The road led past scrub-covered Kalahari sands, with wandering cows, donkeys and horses a constant menace as they ambled unconcernedly out onto the pavement, oblivious to speeding cars. (I heard a Botswanan refer to the Flat Five instead of the iconic Big Five game species; the Flat Five are the animals most often hit by passing cars: horses, donkeys, cows, dogs and chickens.) Sadly we saw one dead African wild dog (or painted dog, Lycaon pictus, one of the rarest of African carnivores) lying on the pavement that morning. We also passed dozens of elephants, attracted to the road by the water flowing along a municipal water supply buried in the sand. It's covered by heavy concrete slabs, but elephants are strong and determined, and for a long stretch to the west of the village of Joani every cover had been flung aside so that elephants could stick their trunks in for a drink. At one spot a herd of zebras, the first we had seen on this trip, waited patiently for the elephants to be done so that they could drink water from the boggy waterhole that the elephants had constructed in the sand beside the water main. Elsewhere ostriches clustered in groups of three or four beside the road.

Zebras waiting for elephants to move on

We got to Planet Baobab around noon and settled in. It's a beautifully constructed lodge and campsite, with lots of enormous baobab trees and even more tiny young saplings scattered around. There's a huge swimming pool in which we lolled during the heat of the day, while the campsites are large and have power. A flock of noisy spurfowl of two species (crested francolin and red-billed spurfowl) kept us amused as we grilled up steaks and drank a fine bottle of Hartenberg Shiraz which we had bought during our wine estate visit back in Cape Town.

A mischievous yellow-billed hornbill at Planet Baobab

Planet Baobab

We would have been glad to spend longer at Planet Baobab, but the nearby Makgadikgadi Pans were calling us. We didn't venture into the Pans back in 2016, so we were keen to get out there to see it for ourselves. We drove south through deep sands with Maree at the wheel, our 4WD low-range engaged, and our tires heavily deflated, past dense bush and cattle grazing on the sparse, scorched grassland. Our first stop was at Green's Baobab, an iconic big baobab used as a waypoint by generations of travellers, including (probably) David Livingstone. A number of these voyagers have left their initials and dates inscribed into the thick bark of this ancient tree, with the earliest that we saw dating back to 1859.

Green's Baobab

Graffiti from 1859 on Green's Baobab

A few hundred metres away is a muddy waterhole where a zeable herd of elephants were heading off just as we arrived, to be replaced by some scrawny cattle. There were supposed to be some old San hunting hides nearby and even some Neolithic tools scattered around, but it was hot and the presence of the elephants dissuaded us from exploring too far afield. We then drove south to the remains of an even older and mightier tree, Chapman's Baobab, said to be thousands of years old, but which fell over in 2016. Even lying on the ground it was an impressive size, but it would have been nicer to see it standing erect.

Terri on the Makgadikgadi Pan

The track across white infinity

By now the deep sands had gotten shallower, making for slightly easier 4WD driving. We drove east through pretty grassland until we arrived at a tiny hamlet with its cattle enclosure. From here we bumped southeast towards the Ntwetwe Pan and its wide-open spaces; our maps were pretty vague about where the open pan began, so we were relieved when we eventually reached a point where we saw white immensity lying to the south and east, with the track driving down onto the salty, cracked, hard surface of the dried-out lake bed. There was once an immense inland sea here, Lake Makgadikgadi, which covered an area larger than Switzerland until the end of the last Ice Age, but now there are three vestigial seasonal salt lakes remaining, Ntwetwe, Nxai and Suwa. Suwa fills with water most years as it's fed by the Nata River from Zimbabwe, but Ntwetwe seems to remain dry most years, resulting in a very hard surface for driving across. (Suwa, in contrast, is notorious for having very soft mud lurking below a thin surface crust, and many a vehicle has sunk into the pan.) We drove a few kilometres into the pan along a well-defined track and suddenly found an established campsite used by a local tourism operator. We cut across open pan, following our GPS, and found ourselves on the main track out in the big white. We zipped along at 60 km/h before finally popping back up onto the grasslands. After a longer-than-expected grassland section, we finally returned to the pan again and found a place to camp out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It was an awe-inspiring feeling to spend the night with white on three sides (we could still see the grassland verge behind us), contemplating infinity and watching the stars wheel overhead.

Stanley on Ntwetwe Pan

A very simple landscape

Camping on Ntwetwe Pan

Milky Way

Early morning light
 

The next day we continued on our way southeast, reaching the edge of Ntwetwe Pan rather sooner than expected. (Did I mention that our maps were very, very approximate?) It was a longer-than-expected bumpy grind through grassland and savannah to reach one of the main veterinary fences of the country before turning south and crossing through the fence. From here it was an even bumpier and slower drive south until we got to the edge of Suwa Pan. We picked our way out onto the salty surface and followed tracks towards Kubu Island, relieved to be out on the smooth pan surface but mindful of the treacherous surface below and reluctant to venture out too far from the "shore". At one point I got out and took some photos and video of Terri driving across the pan; as she slowed down and turned back towards me, Stanley fishtailed dramatically as though on ice. Terri kept it under control, but was relieved to get back to the main track unscathed.

Stanley skirting Kubu Island

Kubu Island's baobabs and boulders

Kubu Island is a scenic spot of high land rising above the pan surface in a mass of huge granite boulders and immense baobab trees. It's a popular spot to camp, but it's expensive and can be crowded, so we headed further south and east to find a free spot to ourselves a few kilometres away from Kubu. It was another beautiful campsite, although much closer to the safety of "shore" than the night before, and it made for another memorable evening alone under the immense dome of the night sky.

Ruined walls on Kubu Island

Kubu Island

On the long road back north out of the pans

The following day we set off back to tarmac. We stopped by Kubu to take some photos of baobabs and of centuries-old stone walls, remnants of the Khami civilization who maintained a trading outpost here. From there we had three options to return to the main tarmac road: northwest across the grassland, northeast across the grassland next to the pan edge, and across the pan edge. We read the route descriptions and chose the second option, which turned out to be worse than expected: four hours of slow grinding through deep sand in low gear, rather than zipping along smooth pan. It was a relief to pop out, pump up our tires using our portable compressor, and drive east into the crossroads town of Nata. We bought fuel and turned south to visit the bird sanctuary on the edge of Suwa Pan, but were advised by the ticket sellers that the water in the pan was so far out that it was almost impossible to spot the flamingoes and pelicans, so we turned back into town and found a place to stay in funky Eselbe Camp, run by an interesting white Swazi guy named Rupert. We spent a fun evening eating, drinking and talking beside the fire with our fellow camp inhabitants, including a very amusing guy named Dwayne, another white Swazi who flies drones and light planes and regaled us with tales, some of which might actually have been true.

Banded mongoose (Terri's assailant)

The next day was October 16th and we were keen to head north to Elephant Sands, one of our favourite spots from our 2016 trip through Botswana. We set off betimes and were at the gate late in the morning. We picked a campsite overlooking the waterhole, popped up our roof and settled in. The key feature of Elephant Sands is its waterhole which attracts hundreds of elephants from the surrounding bush. When we arrived, there were a couple of dozen elephants milling around; a technical problem had stopped the flow of water, and all the thirsty pachyderms were tired of waiting. We spent the afternoon lounging by the pool, photographing and sketching elephants. We ventured in for a dip in the pool, but were slightly put off by all the floating detritus on the surface, particularly when we figured out that it was the dust of elephant dung, dried by the sun and blown by gusts into the pool. That evening we grilled up dinner and sat beside Stanley, watching elephants in the gloaming, before going to the waterhole to watch them, dimly illuminated by the restaurant lights; the energy in the crowd of elephants was mesmerizing as they occasionally vented frustration at the long lineup to drink, and we became keenly aware of how flimsy the low electric fence protecting us was.

Pachyderm detail

Ears shaped like Africa

More elephant skin

Baby learning to use his trunk

We spent the next day at Elephant Sands relaxing, sorting through photos, reading, working out (hanging the rings from a disused water tank tower), not swimming, chatting with our neighbours and (in the case of Terri) baking scones over an open fire using our cast-iron potjie. It was a relaxing day, with less aggravation among the pachyderms (the water supply wasn't cut off during the day) and fewer people staying in the campground. The only moment of adrenaline was in the morning when a passing banded mongoose attacked Terri's feet, leaving her bleeding from either a claw or a tooth.

Chobe sunset

Our final stop in Botswana was Kasane, the tourist town on the edge of Chobe National Park. We left reasonably early from Elephant Sands and stopped in at Sinyati Lodge, site of another famous waterhole that's great for photography. It seemed a bit expensive and our friends Rene and Catrien, who had camped next to us at Elephant Sands, told us that there had been almost no animals at the waterhole the night before, so we kept going to the Chobe Safari Lodge and its opulent campsite, where we set up shop for the next four days. That afternoon we lounged by the pool after booking a river cruise and a park entrance pass for the next day. As we lolled on our lounge beds, suddenly our friends Oskar and Heike appeared unexpectedly; we had first met them at African Overlanders near Cape Town, and then more recently at Drifters Camp. We had a fun evening grilling and chatting with them about their adventures.

A very happy Terri on the Chobe River

Our Chobe National Park day was a day of two halves. In the morning we set off on what ended up being a private speedboat tour of the Chobe Riverfront with our guide George, from Kalahari Tours, an outfit with whom Terri has taken ten student groups to see Chobe over the years. George was an exceptional birding guide, and we spotted a few dozen species during our trip along the placid waters of the Chobe River, with the highlight being watching juvenile yellow-billed storks on the rocks of some rapids downstream of the park. Crocodiles, hippos, impala, bushbucks and dozens of elephants made a fine accompaniment to the birdlife. The Riverfront sector of Chobe is one of the densest concentrations of game anywhere in Africa, comparable to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater, and the number of elephants is awe-inspiring, reminding us of how many elephants have been lost elsewhere in the continent. (Botswana is home to nearly half of all the 400,000 or so elephants remaining on the African continent.) We returned to shore happy with our David Attenborough morning.

African darter

Lilac-breasted roller

African darter

Never smile at a crocodile...

White-faced ducks and a photobombing darter

I'm all eyes (and ears and nostrils)

Mud shower

That afternoon, after a delicious lunch back at the campsite, we dropped Stanley's roof and set off into Chobe. We had visited several times before (or in Terri's case, nearly a dozen times), but we were surprised at what we found. The tracks were in terrible condition, requiring low-range 4WD and lowered tire pressures, while the excellent signage that we remembered from the past was a distant memory, with many signs fallen over or faded to illegibility. We drove around, slighly disoriented (our Garmin GPS unit wasn't functioning at all well!) while the skies darkened ominously and distant booms of thunder echoed across the landscape. We saw lots of impala, lechwe and elephants, and even a couple of puku, but overall there was little game except along the riverfront, and the tracks there were deeply rutted and hard driving, something that we didn't remember from previous visits. Eventually, as the skies turned completely black, we found the main track and headed back towards the entrance gate. Luckily we ran into a safari vehicle that had found a magnificent male lion, so we stopped and gazed at him for a while before bolting towards the exit. The rain caught us two kilometres short in a blinding downpour that luckily only lasted a few minutes, and we squelched back to town and a meal in the Indian restaurant next to our campsite.

African openbill

We spent the next two days relaxing in our camp, enjoying the facilities, swimming, reading, playing chess (for me) with a German tourist on a giant board by the pool, editing videos and planning for the next stage of our journey. Stanley's electrical system developed an annoying fault that cost us the use of our interior LED lights; Oskar and I spent a couple of hours diagnosing the problem without fully resolving it; it's either a software fault in the solar controller, or else a short circuit in the circuit running from the solar controller to the storage batteries, but we couldn't locate any short circuits. I think we will take Stanley in for an electrical checkup here in Livingstone!

Giant kingfisher

October 22nd found us checking out of Kasane, buying water (we had completely drained our water supply and not found anywhere with good, fresh, non-salty water for days), fuel (much cheaper in Botswana than in Zambia) and food before heading to a garage in nearby Kazungula to figure out why we had an annoying rattle in our engine. Frank, a burly Zambian mechanic running Mario's Garage, diagnosed it instantly as a broken bearing on a tensioning wheel for our air conditioner, and within an hour he had fixed it for 400 pula (about US$ 30), including a new bearing, which seemed like a pretty good deal. We headed to the new Kazungula Bridge and drove across, past a long lineup of waiting transport trucks. It was a relatively quick and efficient process checking out of Botswana and into Zambia, featuring our first use of our Carnet de Passage en Douanes. By 2:30 we were driving east towards Livingstone, and by nightfall we had new SIM cards in our phones and were camped in the spacious, leafy surroundings of Tabonina Bis Guesthouse.

It was a slighly bittersweet experience to visit Botswana in 2022. Both Terri and I felt as though the country and its institutions, including its prized wildlife parks, have deteriorated over the past 5 years, perhaps because of the effects of covid-19, perhaps as a result of political changes and infighting between the current president Mokgweetsi Masisi, and his predecessor Ian Khama. Whatever the cause, things just didn't seem to work as well as they did in 2016: the internet, cellular data, roads, the tracks into and through wildlife reserves, the facilities within national parks, the general mood on the streets. I hope that Botswana does manage to regain its mojo, as I have always looked at it as one of the best-run countries on the continent, with a good education system and a large, prosperous middle class. Fingers crossed for the future.

Goliath heron

African darter

We should be here for a couple of weeks (at least) while Terri does some administration at Olive Tree Learning Centre, and then it will be time to head north towards Lusaka and the Tanzanian border beyond, probably via stops at Kasanka National Park, Mutinondo Wilderness and lovely Kapishya Hot Springs.

Elephants swarming Chobe Riverfront

Pied kingfisher

We have just learned in the past few days that Ethiopia, a key country in the Cape Town-Cairo route up the east side of Africa, has introduced some frankly insane rules regarding bringing our own car into the country; travellers have been asked to post bonds of US$ 80,000 or more (in cash!!) to guarantee that the vehicles will leave Ethiopia without being sold. This is exactly what the Carnet de Passage en Douanes system is designed for, so it's annoying that Ethiopia doesn't simply join the carnet system. This may mean (if the rules aren't amended) that we might not make it through Ethiopia, and that we might have to drive south again and ship the car from Cape Town to Europe so that we can drive south again along the west coast of Africa. Stay tuned for updates!!

Our farewell-to-Chobe lion