Official beginning of my organized safari Day1

We were all packed up and on the road by 6am. Many people have been on the tour since Kenya and people seem to be moving like a well oiled machine. They all know what they are doing and where they are going and I feel lost a lot. I’m assured that I will eventually get the hang of things but I’m only on the tour for the last three weeks. Not sure that will happen. We exited Zimbobwe without any issue and entered Botswana at a reasonably early hour of the morning. There is an issue with foot and mouth disease in Botswana so after passport control we had to dip all our shoe bottoms in some sort of cleaner. And we pulled into our first campground with about 20 minutes to spare before our optional tour of Chobe NP was about to leave. No time to set up camp or get settled. I originally wasn’t going to do any of the extras but I’ve come to realize most of the extras things on the tour are extras. Plus, everyone that did day excursions to Chobe from VicFalls had raved about the experience. So an extra $47 for a game drive and $47 for a boat tour seemed very reasonable and cheaper than doing a day excursion from VicFalls.

Chobe National Park is fantastic. The park is huge and home to 60,000 elephants. They have strict poacher laws and the elephants are florishing in Botswana. As its dry season, there were many animals located around the watering holes. Thousands of animals: Impala, cape buffalo, water buck, crocodiles, giraffes, elephants black sabal and hippos. Tons of birds. Apparently I’m the only one on the tour that cares about the birds...and not all the birds but the pretty birds or the interesting birds...I want photos of them. I’ve started thinking of all the herds of prey animals as happy meals on feet. There herds are so big and there are so many of them, I expect the lions and leopards don’t go hungry here.

There was a few hours break between the game drive and the boat ride. I was able to get a tent assigned and someone helped me set it up. Wasn’t going to do be buying lunches but the campground had a lovely little resteraunt and I had a craving for salad. And diet coke. My goal of giving up diet coke has failed. Its available all over Africa and I’m drinking it daily. The restaurant also had Wifi and I’m missing wifi more than I’d like to admit. I like to be able to clean out my email and check my facebook with some regularity. Going 2 or 3 days without being able to check it makes me axious. Mostly because it gets so backed up I’m afraid I’ll miss something important. So I enjoyed a lovely chicken garden salad and a diet coke and checkd the internet before getting shuttled back to Chobe and jumping on a big boat with a bunch of other tourists. On the boat, we pretty much saw most of the same things we saw on the game drive, but because we were on the water now rather than the road, we had a better view and more photo ops. We also got a lovely sunset over the water.

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