There are a few phrases that grew out of our Africa experience.
“Quite as an Elephant” instead of a mouse, because elephants are
amazingly stealthy for an a ten thousand pound animal. “Stand out
like a Chameleon” instead of blend in, because the guides could pick
them out while driving around at 30KPH in the dark.
Botswana’s phrase is “less of the same” instead of “more of the
same.” That is, it was roughly the same experience, but the
animals seemed sparser, the variety smaller, an the safaris less
professional. We did see some amazing things that we didn’t see in
Zambia, and on the whole it was still a great experience..
We left Livingstone
by van for Kasane International Airport in Botswana, which meant we
crossed the border on land. It was interesting; Botswana is very
serious about Covid, and equally serious about hoof and mouth disease.
We had to take all of our shoes out of our luggage and run them through
an anti-bacterial bath.
At Kasana, we took
a small bush plane to a patch of hardened sand in the middle of freakin’
nowhere, where we were met by our Machaba Camp guide for the three days
we were in Botswana, Eric. Machaba uses Toyota Land Cruisers instead of
the Land Rovers we used in Zambia, but they seemed equally tough, and it
was roughly twenty or thirty minutes to the camp.
There we met Joe
and Mel, who were the reason for planning the trip in the first place.
Joe and Mel were on a month-long trip to celebrate their anniversary,
and they wanted to be alone for most of it, but they let everyone know
they’d be in Machaba on specific dates, so Alison generated an itinerary
that ended our Africa journey there.
Machaba was
upscale, but more a “B” kind of place than an “A” kind of place. The
permanent tents were spacious and there were nice touches, but it was
more functional than beautiful (says the folks who were sleeping on a
larger-than-king-sized real bed with hot water bottles tucked under the
down comforter each night). The food was good, the staff eager to
please.It was more crowded than the Bushcamp camps (there were eighteen
people there at the same time as us, and that wasn’t full up). The main
are was nice, but the view was of the fairly small Khwai river and it’s
grassy banks, not the broad vistas of the bushcamp lodges.
The safaris were
more crowded than Zambia, and the drivers/guides
(unlike Bushcamp, where the safaris normally included a driver, a
spotter, and an armed park ranger, Machaba just had a one-size-fits-all
person at the wheel) seemed trained to focus exclusively on the big cats.
You’d end up with (we actually counted) ten vehicles
following a single cat with the drivers all jockeying for the best
viewing opportunity for their guests. It seemed more like animal cruelty
than a safari.
But when we could get Eric’s mind off the cats, we could look for the
things we were interested in and ask him to stop when we saw them. So we
did see some very cool stuff, including a family of pythons (the dad was
14 feet long), a painted dog kill, a number of spectacular sunsets, two
bull elephants that had killed each other, and a number of birds that
seemed less shy than they had in Zambla.
We also had a chance to take a trip
down the river in a flat-bottomed canoe with locals standing in back
using long poles to propel them along. The intent was to see
hippos (which seemed like it might be a bit over exciting) and elephant
crossings, but we didn’t see any. No crocs, either. But it
was a mellow time, and we did see the small river frogs, which were kind
of cool (and we’d seen plenty of hippos and elephants already).
Pictures from the three days:
DAY 1
DAY TWO
DAY THREE
Painted dogs in action (movie) (not PG-13!)
And that brought
our journey to a close (except for the trip home, which is covered in "There
and back again").
