Friday 21st February, Botswana
It is almost two years to the day since we finished our last trip. Having arrived from the UK last Sunday we spent the first few days getting ready. How
much easier it has been to plan and pack for a six week trip rather than a ten months one; no winter clothes to pack and only two guidebooks instead of nine!
We were pleased to find that our truck had not suffered from
being left out in the open since we last used it and apart from a family of
rats having made a nest in our solar panel sleeve, things were pretty much how
we left them. Don had stuffed about 20 packets of moth balls into varies nooks
and crannies of the truck and getting used to the smell took a bit of getting
used to.
So we set off from our base at Ingogo two days ago, heading firstly north towards a town
called Lichtenberg. Don and Ian spent most of their childhood there and hadn’t
been back since the family relocated to Natal 50 odd years ago. Between the two
of them they remembered the name of the street and the number of the house and
we actually managed to find it. The
basic building was still standing but had been added on to and is now enclosed
by a six foot wall.
We spent our first night in our rooftop tent for over a year and even though we camped in the vicinity of a cement factory it felt great to
be sleeping ‘out in the open’ again. From Lichtenberg we headed northwest across what is locally referred to as bushveld country towards the Botswana
border and had a reasonably uneventful border crossing. The biggest challenge
of the day was the temperature, hitting 41 degrees by early afternoon.
Last night we stayed in a nice little camp near Gaberone, the
capitol of Botswana. It was our first night in the real bush and we were greeted by
a large resident elephant as we drove in. Unlike game reserves in South Africa,
here the animals are pretty much free to roam without boundaries and it is not
uncommon to see them crossing the road (even the highway) in front of you.
Right now we are on the main south to north road, hoping to
reach a camp near the northern Botswana border by the end of today, so pretty much
driving all day. We have made the collective decision to drive through Botswana
towards Namibia without too many stop overs. Mostly because we want to spend as
much time as possible in Namibia and explore Botswana another time.
Monday 23rd
Having spent two days driving on good tarred roads we were
in need of a ‘road less travelled’ and took a detour on a remote dirt track which snakes along the Zimbabwian
border to the east and close to the Hwange game reserve (which is in Zimbabwe).
It took us six hours
to cover 110 km and for the first time on this trip it felt like we were ‘on the
road’ proper. It being so close to the border we were warned of possible
poaching activities but apart from some anti-poaching soldiers suddenly jumping
out of the bush in front of us waving their guns (a heart-stopping moment on my
part!) we saw no-one along the entire route; just beautiful countryside and the odd elephant here and
there. Most of the time we were driving through grass as tall as our bonnet and
had to stop every now and then to clear grass seeds and stalks that were trapped in the
radiator.
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| the scull of an elephant by the side of the road |
We spent the night in a nice little camp on the Chobe River
where warthogs wander around your truck, monkeys steal anything they can and hippo are on the river bank right up in front of you. Across the
Chobe River you look at the Caprivi Strip which is a narrow stretch of land
jutting out eastwards from Namibia, which separates Botswana from Zambia. With
Zimbabwe 60 km to the east, this part of southern Africa is a junction point
for four countries.
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| view from our camp towards the Caprivi Strip |
Tomorrow Don and I will take a drive into Chobe game reserve
while Ian and Heather will do some fishing.
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