MORE ELEPHANTS AND HIPPOS

My body happy and healthy again after a few days of uncertainty, we arrived at a camp just outside Chobe National Park in Botswana. Did a game drive in the morning and a boat/river safari in the evening and yes, as you can see by the title, saw many more elephants and hippos. The morning drive was fairly tame – one leopard in a tree, a handful of Kudu, loads of elephants, a lioness sleeping under a tree, and, oddly enough, a hippo sleeping under a tree (he didn’t look too happy and was very much so out of his element). The elephants were hilarious as there were several young that kept running out across the road and the larger mothers would dash (can an elephant dash? I think probably not, so lets say saunter at a very fast pace) out into the road, look at us and flap their ears. One mid size one even came out into the road, made a little song and dance of it while the baby jogged across behind him and into the bush. Once the baby was clear, he carried on and let us pass through. Thus far, this was probably the least eventful drive we had but does one ever tire of looking at elephants? Not yet for me….The evening’s events were comprised of a sunset cruise down the river back into the park. Tons of hippos were playing about in the water and mock fighting as well as grunting and laughing at us. A couple of them even took on the challenge of chasing us off, which I found quite humorous as we were thousands of times bigger than them. However, it is quite an amazing sight to see hippos launch themselves out of the water with great force and charge at you while grunting and carrying on. I am sure that in their little minds, they were quite positive that they were chasing us off rather than us already heading off.

Had a bit of an issue the next morning when the septic tank decided to overflow and run into our camp site. Jules (Sus, my previous tent mate left after Vic Falls) and I were in a somewhat safe zone but decided it was a good move to pick up the tent and move it elsewhere in case the issue got worse. Not a pretty smell and certainly not a nice thing to have running under the tent. Funny thing was, later in the day, another overland truck came through and camped right on the nasty sewage run off (smell had gone by then) and apparently didn’t care even after we told them.