SAFARI!!!

Aaahhhh, today = safari!!  We were so excited this morning that it didn’t matter to us that we had to get up at 6.  We packed up our bags and got breakfast at Jollyboys.  We had yogurt, museli (a type of granola), honey, and banana parfaits and coffee.  Then Shazeda, Chrissy, and I took the van provided by Jollyboys to the Botswana border.  The drive was about an hour, and when we got there we took a boat to go across the river to Botswana.  It seemed really sketchy, almost as if we were being illegally transported into the country.  On the other side we met Kalahari Tours, our safari tour company, and they drove us up the road where we had to go through immigration and get our passports stamped. Right outside of the office, there’s this weird stump covered with dirty water that everyone has to walk through in order to cross into Botswana. There was literally a man there making sure that you walked through it and got the water on the soles of your shoes. Strange immigration rituals, part 1.

When we arrived at the company’s base location they had hot muffins, donuts, fruits, coffee, and tea waiting for us.  We paid for our trips, ate, and then left on our riverboat ride.  Unfortunately, we had a lame boat driver that wouldn’t get too close to the animals on the shore, but we still got to see a lot.  We saw tons of hippos and crocodiles which was so cool!  Sorry Dave and Mike, we know how much you wanted to see these!  We also saw a lot of birds, water lizards, buffalo, and warthogs.  Then after about 3 hours we returned to the dock and went up to the base lodge where we had a huge buffet lunch.  There were about 20 different dishes, including chicken, pizza, sausage, potatoes, pasta salad, apple salad, fresh garden salad, and more.  Then there were fruits and cake for dessert, with more tea and coffee.  We filled our plates and were stuffed – it’s rare that we get to eat like that.  We filled the safari vehicles and headed out to Chobe after lunch.  In our vehicle there were 8 of us, all of whom were going to be camping out in the bush for the night.  Our driver was named IP and he was really cool and proved to be fantastic when it came to getting up close and personal with the animals (much better than our boat driver). 

The first animals we saw on our game drive were impalas, and over the course of the day we saw tons of them.  They are very common in Chobe and you can find them all over the park.  They are kind of like the African form of a deer and very graceful.  Next, we started to see the elephants.  We took a route down by the edge of the river because the elephants go there every day to drink.  Since it’s the dry season it’s the only source of water for the animals so they have to make their way to the riverbank each day.  We saw hundreds of elephants, and that is no exaggeration.  It was incredible.  They surrounded our safari vehicle but didn’t seem to care that we were there.  We even got to see some baby elephants, which were so adorable!  Alongside the elephants were more warthogs, water buffalos, and impalas.  The backdrop was the winding river, and the amazing and vast safari landscape in the background – we felt like we were in the lion king.

Afterwards we headed back up to the bush area where we started to see giraffes.  Chrissy spotted the first giraffe when it was very far away by using the zoom on her camera, and when she showed me I freaked out with excitement.  For those of you who don’t know, giraffes are my all time favorite animal and I had been dying to see them.  After seeing this first one and taking one too many pictures of it, we started to see so many more giraffes that I couldn’t keep count.  At one point, in the time it took to drive 30 seconds I counted about 15-20 giraffes that we passed, it was incredible.  They were enormous, and such beautiful animals.  When we went back down by the water we also got to see some giraffes drinking, with their legs in bent awkwardly like you always see in photos.

It was starting to getting dark and we were almost at the base camp when IP turned around and started driving really fast back the way we had come.  We weren’t sure what was going on, but after about 5 minutes we arrived up behind another safari vehicle and came to a slow crawl.  The next thing we knew we heard a massively loud roar – it literally sounded as if there was a lion 5 feet away from us!  We were pumped that we had found a lion (it’s really hard to find them and not guaranteed), but we were also a little scared.  IP pulled off the road and aggressively drove up and around a bush, shining his lights in front of us.  There, about 50-75 in front of us was a male lion.  We only saw him for a few seconds before he walked back behind some bushes but it was awesome.  Then we headed back to our camp for the night.

The camp consisted of about 8 2-person tents, a campfire with many chairs surrounding it, a table where we would get our food, 2 makeshift bathrooms, a portable kitchen where the cook made all our food.  The man in charge was named White, and he was quite a character.  He gave us a welcome speech in which he explained the dos and don’ts.  He kept stressing that there was plenty of wine for us to drink and that we should try to finish it. (it was boxed wine and Chrissy and I passed on that one).  One of the rules he stressed was to absolutely always zip your tent shut to keep out bugs and animals.  He said that a few nights ago a girl was stung by a scorpion in her tent.  No way in hell were we going to let that happen to us.  White also said that if we ever needed anything in the middle of the night we just had to call out his name (such as if we got up to go to the bathroom and saw a pair of eyes staring back at us in the dark).  The way he imitated this was in a high pitched and girly tone, drawing out ‘i’ sound like “whiiiiiite.”  He also explained that the camp was surrounded by some high powered lights to mark that it was there so that animals would see this and not come near – this sounded a little far fetched to us but we believed him.  I had already decided that if I woke up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom (which I actually did) I would just hold it until morning. Chrissy coped with this situation by just drinking nothing at all. Lol, strategies to avoid getting eaten by lions in the African bush.

We hung out around the campfire talking to our newly made friends until dinner was ready.  We had pasta, beef goulash, roasted potatoes and butternut squash, and a sweet corn and squash mixture – everything was delicious.  We also had a banana and cinnamon pudding for dessert and then roasted marshmallows on the fire after that.  Of course there was tea and coffee to drink – we have found that this is a staple in Zambia, and on our safari weekend alone it was offered about 4 times a day.  Around 10 o’clock we had all decided to go to bed since we had to be up at 6 the next morning to go on the game drive.  The best time to see the lions is early in the morning and we were really hoping to get lucky!