The next morning we packed up our tents and left Victoria Falls for Chobe National Park in Botswana. At this stage of the tour our group splits up and we lost 12 people who were heading down to Johannesburg and we gained another 14 who were heading with us to Cape Town - one of which was 82 year old Herbert AKA Frank, and 3 of them were in their 60's (Ruth, Bill and Pat)and all from Australia - should be interesting !! The campsite is on the banks of the Chobe river and is renowned for large herds of elephants around the river. There was an electric fence between us and the elephants who tended to wander past at night time, which we later found out wasn't actually switched on even though a couple of elephants walked past not far from our tents. They were either frightened by the noise of the campsite or they could read the "Caution Electrified Fence" sign as they didn't wander the actual camp. The next morning we got up early for a 3 hr morning game drive. We were picked up at 5:45am in an open top 4WD - it was absolutely freezing. We were all huddled together with loads of layers of clothes on and underneath blankets but it was still so cold -well it is winter here. Guy is always in charge of the alarm clock, however on this occasion he somehow managed to set the alarm for 5PM instead of 5AM, so it was lucky we even got up at all for the game drive. Shannene (who is not normally an early riser) just happened to be woken up by someone's tent zip at 5:25am - ahh well 20mins to get ready, heaps of time!!
As we've said before animals are more active in the early hours of the morning, although it was still pitch black when we arrived at the park, kind of hard for actually seeing a tree let alone an animal. So we didn't actually see too many animals- the guide said it's too cold (it's still winter here) and the animals were hiding deep in the trees/bush keeping warm. We were a little bit disappointed at the lack of animals that we spotted, but we keep comparing to our very first game drive in the Masai Mara. Once you've had a brilliant game drive nothing compares. We also have to remember the animals are wild and so unpredictable. We have seen a lot of animals, all we have to tick off now is the elusive leopard and very rare black rhino. We got back from the game drive around 9am, had luke warm showers (hot showers in Africa are as elusive as the leopard) and had a cooked breakfas.t of scrambled eggs and baked beans - yummo!! We had the afternoon to chill out and then we had a sunset cruise on the Chobe river where we saw all sorts of wildlife on the Chobe banks such as elephants, crocs, hippos and buffaloes. We took a chilly bin full of bevvies with us as did the other groups on the boat- so kind of surprised we saw any animals as the more we drank the louder we got. There was a lot of shhhhing going on, there was probably more wildlife on the boat than on the banks!! We have seen so many sunsets in Africa, you just don't seem to tire of them, they are second to none.
The next morning brought another early start as we had a long days drive in a south westerly direction to Maun, we we undertook an excursion into the Okavango Delta. The Delta is a huge expanse of water, which has traveled from the Angola highlands, spreading out to form the largest inland Delta in the world. We spent the first night at a campsite in Maun and the next morning we pack up our tents, food, stools, water, our bags - everything we need for the next 3 days/2 nights excursion into the Delta, in the middle of the bush. We traveled north by truck to the Mokoro polers station, where we hired mokoros, local dug out canoes to get us to our campsite in the Delta, which are poled by the local guides through the winding water ways of the Delta. The polers packed the boats up with all our things, everything went with us on the boats - the mokoro boats were the only way in and the only way out. It was very relaxing to begin with, Guy was in the front and Shannene was at the back of the boat and the poler stood behind Shannene guiding the mokoro with a pole. However after 2 hrs our bums were a bit numb and we were a bit sunburnt - the sun was scorching and there was no shade. The Delta was full of reeds, and with reeds come lots of bugs and spiders that hang out on them. The boats just glided through them, but as Guy was at the front of the boat a lot of creepy crawlies jumped onto him,not to mention the odd frog. Some of the boats sat quite low in the water, and unfortunately one of the boats sunk - the English girls Claire and Louise, poor things. When they finally made it to camp, quite a considerable time after us, they were soaking wet and so were their bags and everything inside. Thankfully it was a hot sunny day, so didn't take long for their things to dry out. We set up camp in the middle of the bush -no running water, so no showers (just lots of baby wipes) and no toilets (we did have a make shift long drop that the local polers hooked up for us). The days at the Delta were spent swimming or having a go at poling one of the mokoro boats - a lot harder than you think, easy to go around in circles but hard to go in a straight line), we also went a few game walks. One particular game walk that we went on turned out to be quite an adventure involving an elephant. We had come across some trees where a lot of baboons were hanging out, which our local guide was pointing out to us. We were all looking up at the trees and walking at the same time, however directly in front of us and heading straight for us was a huge elephant. We (our group) had all spotted it and we figured our guide had too but it wasn't until we were literally 20 metres away from the elephant (and he was still walking towards us) did the guide clock him and then yelled RUN!!! So guess what, we did, we all ran in the opposite direction (elephant still following us) and the guide clapping his hands to disorientate him. We finally made it to a safe distance and watched, the elephant then stopped and held his trunk up trying to sniff where we were. He eventually decided we had gone or he wasn't in any danger and carried on. Our hearts were still thumping, we lived to see another day and what a great story to tell when we got back to camp.
That evening we went on a mokoro sunset cruise. Along the way we stopped off at a hippo watering hole, which ended up being quite scary. All of the boats stopped at what seemed to be a safe distance from the hippos, but they became quite aggressive and would grunt at us in anger and then swim under the water towards us. Hippos can swim under the water for quite sometime without coming up for air, so when we didn't see them pop up we had images of them popping up under our boats or directly in front of us. Hippos are very dangerous animals and can move quite fast for their size, even our poler was quite concerned so we would keep saying move back, move back, which he was quite happy about. Although some of the polers were happy to move closer apparently for a better photograph, we were happy to view from a distance, that's what the zoom on the camera is for!! The next morning we packed up camp, and the mokoros and made the trip back along the Delta.