SAFARI – DAY 8 (Chobe National Park, Botswana; Chobe Safari Lodge)

BOTSWANA BITS:

Billboards spotted in several places showing a drawing of a condom with the words “Wear it.”

The hotel provides condoms in the desk drawer.

BACK TO GAME DRIVES

New sightings on our 5:45 AM (!!!) morning game drive: banded mongoose, sable antelope, and a bunch of vultures in a tree but we couldn’t see the kill they were waiting for.  It is still amazing to look up a hillside and see elephants browsing and giraffes nearby and warthogs trotting here and there.  Hard sometimes not to feel like I’m in a 3-D movie theater because this whole experience is so outside the norm. 

After lunch, got a ride to town (Kasane, pronounced ka-SAH-nee) to buy note cards made from elephant dung paper (yes, you read that right – elephant dung has so much dried grasses in it that it makes great paper).  Couldn’t wait the hour to get a ride back to the lodge so we walked back in the HOT sun (at least I had an umbrella, which helped).  Did I mention that it was HOT?  Immediately took a cold shower and tried to start psyching myself up for the afternoon game drive.

This afternoon we went on an extended 6-hour game drive.  At the end of the drive, I asked Lisa if this had been an ordinary fantastic day or an unusually fantastic day and she said it was an extraordinarily fantastic day.  It was beyond imagination, according to me (and a highlight of the whole trip).

As the afternoon went by, the animals we saw just kept getting better and better, and every hour Lisa would say “It just doesn’t get any better than this,” and yet, in the next hour it did get better.  Over all, we saw over 500 elephants in many different family herds – maybe 30-40 herds – with babies and juveniles.  We saw maybe 100 giraffes in different groupings (they don’t tend to travel in very large groups, usually 1 to 4 at a time).  We saw several hundred cape buffalo in small and large herds; two herds of zebra of maybe 30-40 each; several families of baboons; many warthogs; many herds of impala (maybe 500 in all); about 100-150 kudu; sable antelope; one bushbuck (yet another antelope type); crocodiles; a pride of lions resting under a tree and a lioness resting in the open; banded mongooses, and a leopard napping under a tree.  Oh, and bunches of storks and spoonbills and vultures and kingfishers and guinea fowl and many more that I can’t possibly remember.  Oh, and a rare roan antelope.  (The diversity of horn styles on antelopes is fascinating.)  And I shouldn’t forget the hippos in the river and browsing on the plain – at least 100 of them.

During our afternoon break, I stepped behind a large bush (after the guides checked out that it was safe) to “mark my territory” (no flush toilets in the wild, you know).  So I stood there looking at the vista of hundreds of animals.  I couldn’t see any people and I couldn’t hear them, so it felt like I was alone in an African wonder world.  I could almost feel my brain expanding, trying to take in the vastness of variety on our planet.  That feeling and that sight changed me somehow – it is indelibly imprinted in my memory.

At one point, we were watching a large herd of elephants browsing on the plain, and the ones on the far edge of the herd must have smelled or heard something because they all pointed their trunks up in the air like snorkels, trying to smell the air for information.  Then some of the ones in the middle of the herd heard something and their trunks went up, and so the snorkel trunks went up in a ripple through the herd in domino fashion.  At that point, the matriarch must have vocalized the “freeze” command (they do this subvocally in a very low register that we can’t hear) and so the whole herd froze.  Meanwhile, the giraffes nearby noted the elephant alarm and they also froze.  They all stood there, completely still, for several minutes, until the matriarch gave the “all clear” command and then, in unison, they all began to browse and casually walk around.  What amazing luck to see that.

We drove parallel to the Chobe river, on a low hillside a bit above the river.  There was a marshy, sandy, muddy strip before the river, and on the other side of the river was a green, grassy plain for as far as we could see, covered in hundreds of various groupings of animals.  Driving to the river and back out of the park, we seemed to see animals at every turn – first a couple of giraffes on a hillside and then a herd of elephants crossing the road (one gave us a clear “back off” signal), and kudu hiding in the bushes, and impala everywhere, then a giraffe head popping up from behind a bush, then guinea fowl scurrying around, and kudu and impala scattered everywhere. 

And then we came across the lions sleeping under a tree and a female sitting out in the open nearby.  Her tummy was clearly very full.  The lions under the tree looked so much like my cats at home – sprawled out over each other and occasionally turning over.  And then driving a bit further along we came across the big finale to the drive -- a leopard sleeping under a bush.  She was gorgeous.

The sheer diversity and the huge numbers of animals is almost too much to believe or to take in.  “Breathtaking” is too trite; “unbelievable” is not very descriptive,….  I don’t know.  But it was beyond anything I ever imagined for this trip.  “Mind-blowing” is a good beginning for a description.  Basically, you had to be there.  It was an African documentary film being enacted in front of me in real life, on a momentous scale.  We even watched a baby elephant roll in the mud, clearly delighted, while a grumpy male tried to shoo everyone else away to keep the fun mud hole to himself.  He finally finished throwing mud all over himself and moved on. 

We watched a baboon mother grooming and petting a very young baby.  Saw some really young baby elephants.

Back at the lodge – my back is sore, my shoulders and neck are stiff from riding a game drive truck and having a camera and binoculars hanging and banging around all day.  But my spirit is soaring.

MEMORABLE TOURIST QUOTE:  While driving out of the game park, after we passed amazing animal sightings every few feet, a game drive truck passed us going the other direction.  We paused to say hello and a South African white woman who was riding in the truck asked “Where are all the animals?”  She had already passed dozens of elephants, kudu, impala, and giraffes.  I have no idea what her problem was.

BACK TO THE SAFARI:  Watched the sunset this evening.  Picture sitting on a low dune looking out over a narrow river to the wide vista of green grassland beyond. Picture the sun sitting just on the horizon, a big red orb.  Not just orange, but a deep, vivid, lipstick red with a bit of orange at the edges.  And as the sun slowly slides below the horizon, picture a line of elephants silhouetted against the sun.  Now that’s pure African magic.

TRIVIA QUESTION:  On a five-legged elephant, what does the fifth leg weigh?  (Do you even know what the “fifth leg” refers to?)  Answer in tomorrow’s post.