NO SUCH THING AS TOO MANY ANIMALS-CHOBE STYLE

WEATHER: Hot and 30C

HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Having 5 hours free time to chillax by the pool

BUMMER OF THE DAY: Can’t think of anything

BUYS OF THE DAY: Beers on the channel cruise for 3USD

WORD OF THE DAY: Elephant schmelephant

ANIMALS SEEN TODAY: Impala, Helmut head guneie fowl, red billed francolin, sable, elephants, giraffes, yellow billed storks, hammer cock, tropical boo boo, kudu’s, African data, hippos, open billed storks, spoon billed storks, Egyptian geese, white fronted be eater, Nile crocodiles, fish eagle    

CAMP SITE RANKING:  Same as last night

It’s dark; it’s time to get up.  We have animals to see today.  That makes it worth getting up even before the sun.  We aren’t the first ones awake through, you can hear birds chirping, yes even this early and also all sorts of other critters moving around in the scrub.  5am wake-up, told you it was early, 5.20am light breakfast for a 5.40am departure to walk to the reception of the hotel to board out jeeps for the game drive.  I should actually work how many game drives we have been on to date and how many hours we have actually spent in the jeep.  I would have to say we have clocked up around 7-10 game drives, which in hours based on min 3 hour drives, excluding the Serengeti, would be around 35-40 hours and we still have 3 more game drives I think, so we will be close to getting to 50 hours in total.  That is a lot of animals if you base it on we see something every time.  The only place we didn’t see too much was Hwange on the morning drive and Matopo was a little on the skinny side, but other than that, that is a lot of animal photos and we are trying not to take the animals for granted now, you know, you’ve seen one elephant you’ve seen them all type of attitude and just wanting to see the cats now, or pass right on by the zebra’s as we have seen hundreds of them as well.  Well this hasn’t stopped me from taking a gazillion photos, especially of the elephants and giraffes, you can never have too many of these awesome animals and I will apologize in advance for them all on Facebook, as even though they may all look the same, the experience was different for us each time.

So we set off with our guide for the morning Poloko at 6am from the resort for the short 5 minute drive to the gates of Chobe National Park.  The weather is so much warmer than our last game drive in Hwange.  The jeep had blankets that we used on the highway as we were getting some speed up, but in the park we were able to discard the blankets quite early in the piece.  I love Botswana already just based on the weather temperature.  So we drove around the park for 3 hours and the highlight was getting within 2m of a herd of Impala, these guys are usually really flighty, so to get that close with them still munching on breakfast is pretty special, and the other highlight has to be a herd of elephants that were heading to the road, so we backed up to where they were going to cross and they came within 4m of the jeep before changing direction and crossing over just behind us.  Fort a split second it looked like one of the elephants was going to come right up to the jeep.  It was amazing!!!  They are AWESOME creatures, and to get that close in their natural environment is something that I will take away with me on my Chobe experience.  Worth a mention is we saw a Sable for the first time and also some Kudu’s close up also for the first time.  Man they have massive and cute at the same time ears.  We stopped at 7.30am for a tea break, which a little table came out of the jeeps bonnet, and a table clothe laid out and tea served in porcelain mugs, a bit hoity toity to what we are used to, but we lapped it up all the same.    There are lots of birds in Chobe, so if you are a ‘twitcher’ then this would be a paradise for you.  We had a great morning returning back to the camp at 9.15am for a brunch that had been prepared by Simon, Ben and George. 

So we now had some free time till 2.45pm when we had cruise on the Chobe River booked in.  We would be crazy to not make the most of the pool and lounge chairs that also had a view of the Chobe River.  So we togged up, books, diaries and laptop in hand we headed to the pool area.  The great thing getting there early we got our pick of lounge chairs and area, as the morning wore on there was a shit fight for the lounge chairs.  The morning was spent updating my previous day’s blog and plans on catching up on my diary entries, as I haven’t touched it for 24 days!  Now there is nothing like to trying to catch up on journal entries, but 24 days is a little out of control, so I have decided to rip out my notes from my little notebook and I am going to stick them in to the relevant days.  Consider my diary updated, well that was quicker than first expected.  I have a few blank days, but when I am keeping a blog, a diary and my note book, it is a bit hard to try and keep it all up to date as it really is like a triple record.  Well I do like to be thorough I spose!

The resort is quite busy, and there are a lot of people around.  There seems to be a lot of Germans in residence and Europeans as a matter of fact.  It’s a nice feeling that the resort is busy.  I feel sorry for hotels that aren’t busy, so it was a great to have people around.  The resort also has its own residence of monkeys, I am assuming not by choice, as they are cheeky devils.  If you have a piece of food, soft drink cans or anything that looks edible, they will swoop into the pool area and steals whatever they can.  If you try and put up a fight, as they are used to humans, they will either Fake a lurch at you, so you turn brave guy to scared guy in 2 seconds flat, or give you a ‘I’m going to get my friends’ look and run off with the goods anyway!  There were some dumb arse Germans that were eating bananas and apples and were hand feeding one of them.  Idiots, its people like you that makes them so cheeky in the first place.  All it would take would be an accidental scratch from the monkey and god knows what you would catch.  Dumb arses.  So it was funny for the rest of the afternoon watching these monkeys steal people’s food and cans from the tables and even more brash stealing food from the people eating lunch at the restaurant.  We didn’t have any food around us, so we were quite safe from any monkey hands coming near us.  We got a swim in the ice bucket aka pool, I think it may have been 3 degrees warmer than yesterday, but it was quite hot, so I managed to stay in for around 30 minutes talking to Sean poolside before my teeth started to chatter and it was a sign that I had to get out before I got hypothermia.  It was a great way to spend our free time and we are feeling quite rested.

Our 3pm cruise was on a boat that held around 100 people.  We got on first, so we had a pick of where we wanted to sit, son we decided on a table at the front of the boat.  The Chobe River has 2 channels that run into Botswana and Namibia, so we stayed in the Botswana channel for 3 hours cruising up and down.  We saw herds of elephants, a lot of Nile Crocs, 2 of which were MASSIVE, and then the usual baboons, impala, hippos etc…  It was a beautiful day, but we had seen a lot of the same same over the last 5 weeks, so we just enjoyed the scenery and getting some river shots from the river was also pretty cool.  Lisa and I decided to hit the beers, as they were so cold, so we had 4 in the 3 hours.  Man they were good.  It sounds like we were a bit blasé about the cruise, we weren’t, well maybe a little, but it was worth doing and a nice way to spend an afternoon in Botswana.  Man I can’t believe we are in Botswana.  How many people do you know have been here? 

Back to base camp, dinner, and a few vodka’s before people started talking about the English / US language / spelling and knowing I had absolutely nothing to contribute to the conversation took myself off to have a shower and then bed.  We leave Botswana tomorrow, into Namibia, but we will be back into the country again the next day for a few more days.  It sounds weird, but it is quicker to do it this way, than to drive around and enter Namibia from another crossing, time and money wise.  Makes sense to me and you just do what needs to be done George. 

So there is no such thing as too many animals and I look forward to boring you with my next gazillion photos I take on the next game drive we will have in a few days time.  This is Chobe National Park after all.