South Africa and Botswana

Well i am all behind with my blog. here goes.........

South Africa and Botswana


So in Cape Town we dropped a few guys off, some we will miss, one we certainly won't miss. And we gained two Aussie boys and three girls. The gender balance is better now, not such a sausage fest. We left on Tuesday and had a long days drive. Our vehicle is not allowed to tour South Africa because it has no seat belts etc. We are supposed to be just passing through so full steam ahead....until we got to a weigh station where they told us we were one tonne over weight. We had kind of anticipated this. We had to dump the spare differential which lived under the floorboards and weighs just under a tonne. But of course it is too big to get out of the backdoor of the truck. So our only option was to remove the whole back panel of the truck and the steps and the lights. So as usual we all chipped in with spanners and screwdrivers and it took about an hour or so to get the diff out. A forklift truck lifted it out for us, then we had dinner then put the back panel back on. We were still a bit overweight so we sent a couple of our bigger guys down the road so that they were not on the truck next time we were weighed, and it worked. We carried on into the night then bushcamped at a picnic spot. It was absolutely freezing that night, the coldest night of the trip, my feet were like ice blocks even in my sleeping bag. And i stayed in it even in the truck in the morning. Another long drive the next day, but able to sleep under the stars again but for the last time as entering mozzie areas again. Crossed the border from South Africa to Botswana on Thursday. So much easier than the borders on the west coast where you had to sit around for 3 hours sometimes.


There are lots of cows in Botswana. And donkeys. And they like to stand in the road until you have stopped in front of them. A few days of long distance driving, not so much fun when the scenery is not so special and we are speeding along, so a bit boring on the truck. Still, we arrived in Maun and next day headed out to the Okavango Delta. We cruised through the delta on a mokoro which is basically a dug-out tree canoe. Our poler was local guy John and he fixed the leaks with cardboard. Sarah and I thought we had the worse mokoro until we saw the others, although John did spend quite a bit time bailing water out the back! We really were in the wilderness, its not really like a national park with fences or rangers, we were in the animals domain. The cruise was lovely, through calm delta water, lots of lillies and lily pads and a few frogs. Very calm in our mokoro convoy. And after a while i saw my first hippo of the trip, about 100 metres away and just his head sticking out of the water, but still cool. Then we came to a lake where there were 5 of them in the water watching us watching them. As you know, they can be aggressive so we proceeded with caution as they snorted and sounded like Jabba the Hutt laughing. We bushcamped and in the afternoon local guide Alfred took us on a bushwalk. Apparently there are lions out there but we didnt see any, just some zebras and wilderbeest and springboks. It started pouring with rain in the evening and into the morning so the 530am bushwalk was cancelled. But we did go for another walk in the afternoon and saw more zebras! But just as we were heading back, a guide spotted an elephant so we went and checked him out before he wandered away from us. In the evening the guides, male and female, sang and danced to some traditional songs for us. And we played some Aussie tunes to mark Anzac Day.


We cruised back through the delta the next day back to the main road and the town. Some guys did the scenic flight over the delta and said it was so good that i signed up for it the next day. 45 minutes in a small cessna. It was ok, we saw a few herds/pods? of elephants and a couple of hippos but we were pretty high up so they were pretty small, and there were fewer animals than the night before so a bit disappointing. We drove for the rest of the day to northern Botswana. And on the way we saw another pod of elephants right at the side of the road. And a few lone ones. We stopped the truck and watched them for a while. They can be aggressive so Gav was ready to pull of if we needed to! Anyway, this is surely the closest we will ever get to elephants, especially in the wild, outside of a national park. One afternoon we did a cruise on the River Chobe. Saw lots of hippos in the water, and lots of elephants, one herd came down to the river for a drink together, got a great picture of them lined up. Big ones and litle ones!