Day 127: Our First Game Drive

Date: Saturday 2nd August 2008

Staying: Thebe Camping, Kasane, Botswana

Song of the Day: Home on the Range

Today was the first official day of our tour - pretty unbelievable considering what we've already seen. It was an early start - tents packed up by 7.30am, on the road by 8.30am. Early starts are needed in Africa as 'African Time' can mean that things take quite a while.

After an hour or so in the truck we reached the Zambia/Botswana border, queued to get stamped out of the country, crossed the river by ferry, then queued to be stamped into Botswana. We reached our destinate of Kasane at about noon, changed money, then went to Spar for some groceries. My 'truck group' is on dinner tomorrow night so we spent 45 minutes in the supermarket figuring out how to cater for 30 people.

At the campsite we put our tents up, had a quick cold drink at the bar, then went off for a game drive in Chobe National Park. Sometimes the optionals seem expensive, but the US$40 we paid was worth every cent. We saw kudu, giraffes, hippo, elephants and a lion, and each sighting was more impressive than the last. The hippo were crowded together in a couple of groups next to the river. We saw them later lurking just above the surface of the water. We saw at least a dozen giraffes and were treated to the rare spectacle of a giraffe drinking, an extremely vulnerable pose in which the giraffe spreads its front legs as far apart as possible then leans down to the water.

There were hoards of elephants, apparently with there being 4000 of them in the 56 miles of the Zambesi river. We saw some babies also, hiding behind their mothers legs. At only three weeks they hadn't yet mastered their trunks, so their attempts to imitate the adults weren't proving very successful.

The highlight however had to be the lioness. We saw her sitting behind a few bushes, a freshly killed antelope on the other side. On our first pass she was lazing. On our way back however, three other vehicles were pulled up, as the lioness decided that it was dinner time. As she fed, pulling and tearing at the meat, she occasionally put her head up to keep an eye on her onlookers. Everytime she raised her head, 20 cameras went snap! After about 15 minutes she decided all this attention was a bit much, so she retired back behind her bush. We all drove back to the campsite thoroughly satisfied, watching the beautiful colours of the Botswana sunset.