We wake up before the sun for our 5:30am guided drive through Chobe—our last of the trip. It is cold, especially on the 8-minute drive from the lodge to the park gate. They supply us with blankets, and we end up just throwing them over our heads.
There are 9 of us in our truck and about 10 trucks just from our lodge alone—many more than there were on yesterday’s drive. This is when the whole safari thing can start to feel a little bit like Disney World. Continue reading
Our first morning at the Chobe Safari Lodge is fantastic. We spend it reading, relaxing, drinking coffee and not cleaning out a refrigerator. This is the first day we don’t have to pack up our camp or drive our truck at all. Instead, we spend a lot of our time dealing with animals that have decided to use our campsite as their second home.
Warthogs are no longer difficult to photograph, because there’s a group of them that, after head-butting me in the leg to try and get me to drop my bread (I might have egged them on), decide to nap in our camp. Continue reading
After listening to something scrounging around in our trash all night, we wake up early to get out of Chobe National Park. It’s not that Chobe hasn’t been beautiful, but our time here has been surprisingly difficult: too expensive and too crowded to stay, too difficult to drive, and our game drives through this area of the park have been relatively empty.
After so many good days in Moremi and camping on the Kwhai River, we wake up excited to see what Chobe—which boasts the largest population of elephants in Africa—has to offer us. That is, besides elephants. Continue reading
Our plan to wake up early and spot a big cat proves successful—five minutes into our 6:00am game drive sans coffee (“STOOOOVEEETOOOPPPS,” we yell, shaking our fists at the sky), we spot a lioness lounging in the tall grass inside the Xakanaxa campsite. She’s beautiful and BIG, and not too interested in sticking around. We attempt to take some pictures, which don’t really turn out, but alas—we saw her. Waking up early worked! And she was in our camp.
