Botswana

Leaving Livingstone we entered Zimbabwe and I bought a hard boiled egg before crossing the border bridge. A moment later I heard a truck horn followed by someone firmly yanking my hand downward. I whipped around to find a male baboon, as large as me, who had just failed in his attempt to steal my egg. In one reactionary moment I wound up and drilled the egg at him with everything I had, and with some luck it exploded square on his left eyebrow. He was stunned, sat back, and then proceeded to eat the bits of egg from his face. I suppose it was a happy ending for us both. The city of Victoria Falls was merely a jumping point, and we continued the next day to Botswana’s Chobe National Park.

Chobe
Game drive after game drive, I’ve found that it takes increasingly more to be impressed. This is how I felt entering Chobe – what could this place possibly produce that would upstage what we saw in the Crater or Mara? Maybe halfway through the drive, as we approached the Chobe River, we witnessed something truly special. A herd of elephants – too large to count and in excess of one thousand individuals – was approaching the river to drink and bathe. Each one walked right past our vehicle as we stared for over an hour, speechless, at this extraordinary spectacle.



Okavango
The Okavango Delta’s natural history is as impressive as Serengeti’s wildebeest migration. The Okavango River originates in Angola and flows 1,000 miles into Botswana, gradually evaporating in the Kalahari desert and forming the world’s largest inland delta in the process. The delta is so massive that its wildlife is best viewed from an airplane. In addition to flying over the delta, we spent two nights camping on an island about 3 hours canoe (or mokoro) ride from Maun. It was a bona fide bush experience: elephants trampling through the camp at all hours, hyenas whooping at night, a symphony of delta frogs and insects, and a star-lit southern sky to top it off.