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Chobe National Park, Botswana

“Flapping” is the word used to describe our 3 times a day chore. After washing up, all the cutlery, culinary, crockery, pots, pans and utensils needed to to be flapped. To complete this, swing as many times as needed until dry. You can imagine how amusing that would look to the other fellow campers, watching 25 people flap objects. Dave and my permanently assigned duty is to put the table and wash bowls out. The other duties are on a rotational roster and include: food prep, washing up, pots and pan cleaning and sweeping the truck. Food shopping every few days is done by whoever wants to help the Intrepid Chef. I tell you, by the end of this I may even make a half decent domesticated wife… Dave can only hope.This camping thing is definitely the way to travel. I wouldn’t do it any other way. It’s a lot of fun being ‘a part’ of a group. Tents take 1 minute to put up and down and we eat much better than if we were in hotels as it’s real home cooked food with meat, fruit and veggies (often 2 course dinners), and you can’t get much closer to the Chobe National Park than this. Our camp ground is plonked on the banks of the park with a river in between and a sign that says beware of the Hippos and Crocs. From the bar (as every good campsite has) 40 elephants can easily be seen drinking from the river. Chobe National Park is the most heavily populated elephant sanctuary in the world with a massive 120,000 elephants over 11,000sqkm.

Before sunrise we did our first game drive of the tour. I hadn’t met cold wind until then. 3 Marino base layers, 2 hoodies, a windbreaker, 2 pairs of pants and a blanket, mind you I do wear that in Aussie! So worth it though, to see so many lions, hundreds of giraffes, antelope and eagles in their own environment. By lunch time, the layers are stripped off and we’re laying by the pool in bikinis drinking Savannah Dry cider!

Our last outing in Chobe N.P was an afternoon cruise on the river. Fantastic way to see hundreds and hundreds of African elephants and buffalo as they like being at the waters edge in the afternoon sun. The water is still and suddenly from nowhere hippos poke their noses out. Many are hiding, but with so many out and about its easy to get to see the 2 tonne sausages. Crocodile alley didn’t disappoint and neither did the bird life. It’s a Mecca for wildlife photographers. Even with a point and shoot you can’t go wrong, but there’s always one or two with a camera lens the length of me. Africa is the first place ever, Dave and I have both had a surreal moment and been like “we are in Africa”. We haven’t felt that way in any other country/continent. I’d say it’s because Africa is so different to anything in this world, so vast and natural. That feeling was unexpected, yet the landscape is exactly how you picture it. Kind of like you’ve jumped straight into the pages of a National Geographic mag. This time of the year is the best time to visit. The sky all day, everyday is brilliant blue, the miles of parkland is brown with those trees with with not one leaf but a lone vulture sitting there. The wildlife is so natural in its surroundings, using the sweeping river to its full advantage. The huge orange sun sets over the land. It’s so breathtaking, I’ve never seen a sky so orange and red. The sun descends behind the earth so fast, the lit up sky only lasts seconds before the night sets in.

After leaving Chobe National Park, we are heading to Namibia for the night before heading back to Botswana to the Okavango Delta for a couple of days. I’m writing this on the 7 hour drive to Namibia. On the truck we were speaking to this couple in their 60s about a travel hobby of theirs. They do this thing called GeoCaching which is a bit like an outdoor round the world treasure hunt, using a GPS to hide and seek containers / codes with other treasure hunters. There are over 2million containers hidden around the world waiting for people to discover them. This couple have a GPS with an app that places them as close as a few metres to the vicinity of this hidden code. They were about to search for one near the Botswana Namibia border. Previously they’ve found them hidden on a bridge inside a dummy bolt with the middle drilled out, in a fence paling, a seat with a loose end, in a tree or have had to solve a puzzle first. Once the code is found you sign a piece of paper inside the capsule and put the code on the website as proof you found it. Containers are hard if not impossible to find, like the one in Canada which required a 4 day trek though wilderness. It was then still so hard to find it took 10 years before the first person found it. There is even one on the International Space Station. Anyone can hide a code which is why they are in most of the countries around the world as tourists often hide them. It may sound like an adult’s travel game, but guess where it started? Well, it all started when Bill Clinton sold some satellites. The more you speak to fellow ‘full passport’ travellers the more travel envious one gets. This year away is a speck in the ocean compared to this truck full of people’s stories. Everyone needs a bucket list full of destinations and things to do. Mine is to find a GeoCache in the Serengeti!


Random facts about African animals – part 1:
– A group of giraffes moving is called a journey, whereas not moving is called a tower
– Rhinos and lions generally only roar at night
– A giraffe who has just been born falls 3ms. Neck problems are common, a parachute would help
– A pregnant mum hippo hides from the dad hippo. If the mum gives birth to a baby boy hippo, the dad will kill it as it’s a threat
– Rhinos kill the most people, yet are vegetarians, as their stubby legs can’t climb over logs it’s best to run over logs when running away
– On heat lions mate about 60 times a day and it lasts for about 10seconds
– As you would know giraffes have black/ blue tongues, but the reason is so their tongues don’t get sunburnt as they stick out so much
– Impalas can delay their birth by up to a month if there isn’t enough food around for the baby. If they still can’t find enough food it can also perform its own abortion by eating a poisonous plant that kills the baby not the Mum.

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