Rainbow over the Victoria Falls

When visiting Vic Falls in Zimbabwe, we took a ride with a helicopter. Much worth the $$ ;-)

Our first Self-Drive in Botswana, part 1

With this post, I will try to describe our wonderful first Africa experience day by day, along with some photo material. As this takes quite some time to produce, I will be posting seperate parts over the next couple of days/weeks.

August 27, 2011
Flight from Amsterdam to Johannesburg with KLM KL591 in a Boeing 777-200. Uncomfortable seats in economy, sober catering and the old entertainment system made it a long long flight.

Spend the night at a Protea hotel near the airport. What a fantastic first experience. Very friendly staff, nice atmosphere and the waiter came to our table with champagne for breakfast! Cost appr. ZAR 750 p.p. sharing.

August 28, 2011
Flight from Johannesburg to Kasane with Air Botswana in an Aerospatiale/Alenia ATR42-500 turboprop 42-74. First time in my life that I flew backwards! (not the plane, just my seat was opposite to my wife's ;-) Cost ZAR 4,072.00 for our 2 return tickets.

Friendly guy from Bushlore who told us he had been driving all day and night to deliver our car in time.
It's a Toyota Hilux 2.5TD DC 4x4, fully equipped with rooftent, camping gear, fridge, gas & water. Marco de Lange from Tongasabi had arranged this car for me. The guy gave detailed instructions, and spend a lot of effort on correctly filling in the paperwork. We dropped him off down-town and bought him some drinks for his return trip.




Did our first shopping at Choppies. Great to experience a supermarket in Botswana for the first time. Trying my best to drive on the left side of the road...

Off to Chobe Safari Lodge, to discover its already full. (you cannot book a campsite in advance, first-come-first-serve only) Hmm, I had not planned to already having to improvise on day one. Especially because the diesel-tank appears rather empty and it's 2 hours before it gets dark.

Used the wonderful Garmin GPS that Come-Along-Safaries had borrowed us for this trip. Loaded with Tracks4Africa maps and details, it was simple to find an alternative camp site: Senyati Camp, some 14 kilometers south-west of Kasane. (S17 52.362 E25 14.138, email) Rather deep sand road! Elephants! Me nervous! Don't wanna get stuck in the sand! Pff.... we made it :)

The owner is named Lou, a very friendly host. Honesty bar on the deck with a fantastic view on the waterpool some 10 meters away where elephants, baboons and others come to drink. What a great place to be in! Setting up the tent for the first time was easy. 5 Minutes and we were done.

Getting dark, lots of noises. Loud sounds from the elephants at the pool, kind of sounds you never heard in the zoo.

Cooked a lovely diner on the campfire, drank a couple of beers, went to bed at 20.00. Wow, what a first day!

August 29, 2011
Woke up by the sounds of ground hornbills at 6am. Thought it was people marching and singing in the distance! Black man came to make a fire so we will have warm water. Hmm, my wife had a cold shower.Guess that didn't work to well. I'll skip the shower for today... It is so nice here, that we quickly decided to stay a second night. The bread for breakfast is not as nice as I had hoped.

Went off to Kasane to look around, exhange 1,000 of our ZAR's into BWP's and get our 160 liter diesel tank filled. Surprise! We meet the same guy from Bushlore again, chatting with some locals. Seriously wonder if our car ever got driven all the way from Johannesburg. More likely, the previous driver had handed it in in Kasane too... (11 days later this proved to be true... Shame on you Bushlore...)

To be continued (soon)...

Sunspot in Zimbabwe

Enjoying a lovely dinner (ao. a good piece of warthog) at the Victoria Falls Safari Lodge in Zimbabwe, I took this close-up of the sun setting down in Zimbabwe. To my surprise I noticed that I probably captured a real sunspot (wikipedia):

At first I thought this was caused by some dust or dirt on my lens. This was not the case.
Would be great if someone with more experience could confirm (or explain what this is)...

African ATM Out of Order

Did you know Symantec was tampering with ATM's in Botswana?
Unfortunately I could not locate a mouse or keyboard ;-)

Lion King Sunset

Taken on the Okavango River, near Ngepi Camp in Namibia (click to enlarge)

Recognize this?

Giraffes are wonderful animals. Take a look at this close-up that my wife shot, isn't it cute?

Now imagine we're (game-) driving that very same morning, just a couple of hours later. We spotted a hyena that was walking in the field at about 200 meters from us, carrying something big in his mouth. So I immediately drove up there to get a closer look:

We were shocked and amazed at the same time. It was carrying the decapitated head of a giraffe, wow! Here's another close-up:

Several days later, we had driven through some rough terrain and opened our fridge to get a nice cool beer. It appeared that a bottle of ketchup had exploded. I couldn't resist to add this picture, to make the giraffe story even more dramatic:

Please drop a message if you recognize any of this (I mean the story/experience, not the fridge)  ;-)

Crossing Third Bridge in Moremi, Botswana

Thank you Roger Beeckman for shooting and sending me this great picture of our Third Bridge crossing!
A while later Roger had to help out another self-driving couple who got stuck in the sand.

 

As a first timer, I'm proud that we never got stuck ourselves (at least not in the sand, but that's a different story) ...

Bridge washed away in Botswana

This is why we couldn't travel from Toteng to Maun, on the 'normal' road:

For the local pedestrians, some people had improvised a ferry: