The last night in Vic Falls we went to a very cool restraunt for dinner. They had a big buffet and I got to try impala. It was very yummy! (Sorry African Bambi!)

The next day Avril, Jo and I went to a hotel nearby and relaxed by the pool. We even got to eat lunch at the swim up bar in the pool. That was sure a nice way to escape the heat.

That afternoon we set off for Botswana. We stayed at a camp site right next to Chobe National Park that was really nice except for one thing… the sewage pump or line had burst and our tents and truck were surrounded in sewage. Nasty! Some people just sat there happily and ate there dinner in the middle of the stench, but I had to stay as far away as possible. (Luckily, the next night some of the other campers had left so we could move our tents.) We went on a game drive in Chobe Park, which was pretty cool. The best part of the drive was that we were able to see a leopard eating a big lizard. (Leopards are one of the hardest animals to spot, so this was only the second time we had seen one.)

We moved on to the North-Central part of Botswana and went to the Okavango Delta. The delta is a really neat place that is basically like a huge marsh with a few islands in the middle were animals live, and where we camped. Our mode of transportation the whole time we were in the delta was a macoro. (sp?) Which is basically a little canoe that is carved out of a tree trunk. They are really small and tippy. We had polers for each of our macoros to get us around. They drive it by pushing a long stick down in the water and push off the muddy bottom.

 

We bush camped in the delta, so there were no toilets, showers, or even water. (We had to just stick our water bottles in the delta and fill them with the water there, which is supposedly very clean.) It was extremely hot while we were there, so for most of the day we just laid around in the shade, read, played cards, and sweated a lot! In the evenings and mornings we went on game walks and saw a bunch of animals (elephants, hippos, zebra, gazelle, impala, badgers etc).

 

There were a few very exciting moments. The first one happened when Katherine sent one of the polers out to fill up our water bottle. He was out in the middle of the waterway bent over with the jug, when an elephant that had been drinking in the distance decided that he didn’t like the poler and was going to charge him. He came running at him full speed through the water and was trumpeting so loudly. The poler waved around his stick and yelled at the elephant to scary it. Luckily his tactic worked and the elephant stopped about 10 feet in front of him. That sure freaked everyone out. Later in the same day we were going for a sunset macoro ride, when the polers decided that they wanted to bring us to a hippo hotspot. We were all very nervous about this, since we were in tippy canoes just inches from the water. Plus hippos happen to be very aggressive animals and they kill the most people every year in Africa. When we got there, they told us that the hippos were all gone. That’s when one decided to pop up out of the water. It would submerge and get closer and closer each time it popped up. A bunch of us were freaking out and begging our polers to take us back. After a few minutes of laughing at us they took us back to camp.

 

That evening they sang some songs for us and we played some games around the camp fire. It was a very cool experience!