Out in the bush, Botswanan NATIONAL PARKS!
So the
time soon came for us all to go and start seeing the “real” Botswana. Soon we
were already past the gates of the national park and we were recording the
first mega-herd of elephants we had ever seen in our lives! I really do love elephants
except for the time when they raise their trunk, flap their ears and charge us
(this did actually happen twice). There
were about 300 of them, although one thing that I noticed is they were not really
spread out, normally right next to the road sometimes about 1 meter away from
our car!!!
As we
kept on driving we realized that we were really experiencing the type of events
that you would see in David Attenborough’s documentaries!
I was
really happy that we were officially “Out in the bush!” Along the drive to our
camp we saw many antelope and (as we have a new guide book to birds) we were
able to fully appreciate the lives of the birds up in the sky. When we got to
our camp we had two crazy things that happened to us:
1.
After bumping around all day we had finally found out that a tin of pesto went
flying in our boot and got everything “pestoed out!”
2.
Secondly, we had a huge full-grown male African elephant walking ten metres
from our car and looking at us. I (unsuccessfully) tried to track him down to
the river.
Apart
from those two crazy events we were happy that the night was juuuust perfect!!!
We met
a South African man who was really excited about something, later we found out
why: he had just gone to a kill-site and we were about to see it as he had told
us the directions. As we got there we saw two massive female lions lurking
around the bush 300m away. Not any action. Although we promised that we would
come back in the evening. When we came back, there was complete madness: the
domo (dominant male in Irwin talk) sprawled on the floor next to the elephant
(he had clearly had his fill) and all the other lions shoving their mouths into
the elephants belly and ripping of kilos of elephant at a time! Of course we
also had scavenger activity around these massive carnivores.
Vultures
would be hawking up in the sky circling the elephant about 20m above-head and you
would occasionally see the small side-striped jackal sneaking around the long
grass as sly as foxes… This was, by far, the best wildlife activity I had ever
seen in my entire life!
Around
the time we were settling down to sleep we heard the lions roaring and walking
around our camp like kings. Sadly we didn’t get any sightings of them as we
were all quite huddled in our tents shivering with fear…
When
we woke up in the morning we found out that there were some lion tracks just
next to our car. MAN! I was THAT close to seeing them again.
Later
we left the camp and drove for about half the day to get to a place in the
Okavango Delta called Moremi National Park. The camp that we went to was so
full of nature that as soon as I went out on my walks on my own I saw all of
the following: Baboons, Impala, Zebra, Wildebeest, Hippo and Kudu. This was
really a wildlife-lovers paradise.
I
spent the rest of the day either on the water tower looking at the animals with
my binoculars or on the bridge photographing the hippos.
After
ticking this National Park off the list we had to continue onwards to Namibia.
We spent some really fun time and we were sad to say goodbye to the whole of
Botswana. As we moved forwards we were all ready for the fierce conditions of
the Namib…