Hope your 2014
is off to a good start! We traveled for almost two weeks over the “festive
season” and, by the title of this entry, you can tell that we had some pretty
exciting adventures. We spent the first half of our trip in the hot and steamy Mkgadikgadi
Pans at a campsite called Tree Island. We stayed here last Christmas and found
it quite peaceful and a nice retreat, so we decided to go back again this year.
Rarely do we camp in the same place for five nights and it was very restful. We
spend our days watching the zebra migration, spotting interesting birds (saw my
first Africa green pigeon – what a beauty!), getting some driving lessons (one
of my New Year’s resolutions is to improve my giant Land Cruiser driving skills,
remember back in the States I drive a tiny VW bug!), and trying to stay cool
while swinging in the hammock and reading. Fortunately, Santa did find us and
Christmas day was occupied with playing a trivia game my sister sent us that
only proved that my husband is a lot smarter than me (except when it comes to
an American cultural references, where he is…useless! In the end, I think we’d
make a great “team”).
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| Zebra Migration at Mkgadikgadi Pans |
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| Tree Island Camp Site |
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Santa Found Us in the Bush
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African Green Pigeon
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One of our
favorite days on this leg of the trip was spent watching elephants frolic in
the waters of the Boteti River near Kumaga and play in mud holes to stay cool. With
temperatures in the high 90s, it seemed like all the elephants in the area were
headed down to the river for a drink or a dip. Down on their knees, spraying
mud on their backs, rolling around trying to cover as much of their massive
bodies as possible, dunking each other in the river like kids playing in a pool
– it is hard not to see joy in their actions! We spent hours just watching them
“play” (On a couple of occasions, the time spent was not of our own choosing as
elephants came down from up on the ridge toward the river both in front of us
and behind us. We had to wait until they cleared out in order to drive
through). There was a spirit of Christmas in the air as elephants and cows
(from outside the park boundaries) intermingled to create a peaceable kingdom.
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| A Peaceable Kingdom: Elephants and Cows Together |
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Animals Marching Two by Two
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We should have
known the rain was coming when we saw the “animals marching two by two”. After a
brief stopover in Maun for a couple of days to restock, we headed north toward
the Linyanti, Savuti and Chobe areas. This part of the trip was somewhat of a “Busman’s
Holiday” (did you know that term? Because I didn’t but Paul tells me it is a vacation
during which one engages in activity that is similar to one’s usual work). Paul
needed to map some new road networks and stretch points in the parks for his
maps.
Our first night
we camped at the staff village up in Linyanti (a section on the Western side of
the Chobe National Park that I hadn’t been to before). We needed to map the new
water front routes around the Linyanti Swamps. And, as you might image, “swamps”
bring all types of challenges including a mosquito population that was so
tenacious that they even persisted in the heat of the day and the pouring rain.
At night we didn’t even go outside for fear of their attack. Despite our best
efforts with bug spray, it will be amazing if we don’t malaria! One night as we
hunkered down in the tent, we could hear a hippo grazing nearby. Chomp, chomp,
chomp, chomp like some incessant mowing machine that didn’t even take a moment
to chew the content of its full mouth before swallowing. At one point, Paul
grabbed his glasses to see if he could see how close he was to the tent (it sounded
VERY close) and the chomping stopped instantly!
We didn’t breathe. If he got frightened and charged the tent, we were goners. We left that location after one night!
Throughout the
trip we encountered stranded and sometimes terrified tourists challenged by the
extreme road conditions. With water water everywhere we towed stuck tourists
out of mud holes, followed a broken down camper being towed by another vehicle to
make sure they made it out of the park and even had to winch ourselves out of a
tricky spot at one point in time! The roads from Linyanti to Savuti was
especially bad, not only because of the amount of rain water, but because
elephants had had a field day digging in those roads and their damage was
impossible to see until you landed in it.
On one such
occasion we had our two left wheels attempting to maintain solid ground out of
the water, while our two right wheels navigated the depths of the flooded road.
A Land Cruiser can tilt quite a lot without flipping over and it always makes
me nervous (Paul routinely asks, “How’s your tilt-o-meter?” when we find
ourselves perched at an uncomfortable angle). We are trundling along when BAM we hit an
elephant hole and get stuck. No forward movement, no backward movement – we are
stuck!! The vehicle is tilted at a 45 degree angle and, since Paul’s door is
literally hitting the earth, we have to crawl out of my door which now is at the
“top” of the vehicle (Did I mention that on our two days back in Maun I managed
to throw out my back trying to straddle a mud puddle while opening up the
impossibly heavy gate to the ostrich farm and am now on pain medication while
climbing out of the vehicle? Just adds to the excitement). Fortunately, we have
a winch mounted on the front of the vehicle. We tie it around a small tree,
Paul climbs back in the vehicle and I stay outside to operate the handheld
device that reels the wire back in thus pulling the vehicle towards the tree
and out of the mud. I start winching, he starts driving and we manage to get
the stuck vehicle righted and we’re back on our way (so sad to report I don’t
have a picture of that but I was a little busy. I promise to do better next
time).
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Super wet roads in Savuti
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| Camping in the Bird Hide |
We spend a
couple of nights, including New Year’s Eve, camped out in the bird hide of a relatively
new lodge in Savuti called Ghoha Hills. We ring in the New Year serenaded by a deafening
chorus of frogs (I’m not kidding you. It is so loud we have to raise our voices
to hear each other!). By day we map
their newly established and highly overgrown roads (with all this rain, all the
new roads they cut the previous dry season are almost undetectable). Much of
the time we have a staff person with us to “show” us the roads (since they are
nearly impossible to identify). We venture out one late afternoon alone to get
the final road before we depart the next day. We’re feeling pretty confident as
we’ve actually acquired some skills at “undiscernible road identification” (the
trick is to not look at the ground but at the brush to the side of where the
road should be, if you see a space wide enough for a vehicle between the
bushes, it MAY be the road). Paul moves trees the elephants have knocked over
into the “road” and we’re doing pretty well until we lose the road in an open
field and all that stands before us is wall to wall Mopani forest.
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Bush Break
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| Clearing trees from the road |
In a situation
like this one can follow an elephant trail (a single lane path used routinely
by elephants) but, perhaps surprisingly, elephants are narrower than our
vehicle and they can squeeze through spaces the vehicle cannot. We struggle to
find clearings in the forest we can get through.
We have a GPS and can see
where we are and where the road we are trying to get to is, but we can’t find a
way to get there. In my mind, I’m making a plan for staying the night here, as
the sun is starting to go down and it will really be impossible to find our way
out in the dark. We have come too far to turn around and go back. “We’ll be OK,”
I tell myself. “We’ve got wine and food in the fridge. And I can sleep curled
up in a ball in the back of the vehicle (not advisable by back specialists, I’m
sure, but I can do it!).” But just when I think we’ve got it under control, we
encounter a herd of unhappy elephants and they start trumpeting, standing tall
(stretching to their full height and width with ears out), and shaking their
heads (a rough shake of the ears to signal they are NOT happy with our presence).
We retreat as quickly as one can in a Mopani forest only to bump into another
unpleasant group of elephants. They are everywhere and they are not happy! (What
happened to those frolicking friendly elephants we watched at the Boteti
River?). The elephants up this end of the park are on edge. Some suggest it is
because poachers coming in from Namibia (we are very near to the Caprivi Strip)
are active in this area and the elephants see vehicles as a potential threat.
Miraculously we “bush bash” our way out, eventually finding the road near
Quarry Hill and ultimately (after a long very wet drive up from Savuti) make it
back to the comfort of our bird hide and frog chorus. Phew!
The rest of our
trip is spent in Chobe (where we see a beautiful pride of three adult and six
young lions on a kill) and Kasane (where we have a lovely meal at an Indian restaurant).
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way (according to the Center for Disease
Control website within the last one to three weeks) we’ve picked up a case of
giardia and I am sicker than sick (what we call “the twirls” since this best
describes the action you engage in trying to determine which end of your body
has the highest priority over the toilet – not fun!) which delays our return to
Maun by a day (there is NO WAY I could get in car).
Ultimately we
get back home safely. Paul gets sick when we return (then drops a 20 liter
jerry can full of fuel on his toe!) and we are now both on medication that
seems to be helping the giardia situation. Did I mention, “Africa is not for
sissies”? Oh yeah, that was the last entry. Hope you’ve enjoyed (from a
distance) some tales of our Christmas-New Year’s adventures of 2013!
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| Flame Lily |
