🙂 Buddymoon, Elephant in camp, Honeybadgers …Bliss! Catheterise shenanigans!
🙁 Late flight arrival meant we missed a night in the Delta
We transferred by road to Kasane and flew into the Delta on a small plane with our friends that we had befriended in Nepal in 1995 (and who have since become part of our closest family friends and we are godparents to their 3 children 🙂 ) – spotted a herd of elephants from the air.
On arrival at Gunn Camp Charlotte was harassed by a ground hornbill who decided that a football was less interesting to chase than a toddler!
We were met by our guide, Electricity and after a quick lunch were soon on board the mokoros heading to our camp.
This has to be the most tranquil experience in the world – one is in complete unity with nature – divine.
The crocs were enormous!
En route we encountered some pretty aggressive hippos having a tiff! Scary stuff – they are responsible for the most deaths in Africa!
On arrival we set up our tents. An elephant was taking fruit from palm trees near to our campsite while a giraffe baby and mother observed us.
We enjoyed a bush walk – we split up so that Rob and Jo would be more likely to have good sightings as our younger ones are a bit noisy! We spotted honey badgers (great result!) – BUT … they climbed a tree and watched a lioness and her tiny cubs for a couple of hours!!! What luck!
When we returned it was time for a bush bath.
We then enjoyed a meal cooked on the open fire… The guides loved Charlotte!
We sat around the camp fire chatting before having an early night.
The next morning we were up bright and early…BUT … I was 19 weeks pregnant with Caitlyn and I have a retroverted uterus which means that between 16-20 I struggle to have a wee and Paul had to catheterise me… this of course happened in the morning and we had not shared this with the Coes… so Paul did his usual but our cup was overflowing and he had to call for another cup to catch the flow – the Coes were horrified and made us etch our initials into our plastic mugs! 🙂
The next day we enjoyed a trip in the mokoro and had some fab elephant sightings from the river bank – He was having a dust bath and then got agitated with us and trumpeted and then he mock charged. SO exciting!
When we got back we cooled down with a swim.
We then broke some palm fronds to make cricket bats and picked up some of the hard, cricket ball shaped palm fruits and had a great game of bush cricket. Trent bowled so hard that he injured Rob’s finger – he still has the scars today!
That night we went to bed early and in the middle of the night I woke up with the need to wee…Paul had to put his head torch on to perform the required procedure… Trent woke up and asked Paul what he was doing and then fell back asleep without further ado… A couple of weeks later, Trent’s teacher called me in to show me Trent’s Essay on what he had got up to in his summer holidays and it read, ” We were camping in the Okavango Delta and I woke up and daddy had his head torch in between Mommy’s legs…” Needless to say we were a source of great amusement for the Common Room and when I bumped into her by chance years later that is the first thing she recalled and says she always shares this story as one of her funniest teaching moments!
Bye Bye Botswana … for now – we would be back!
Go to: Okavango 1995
Go to: Okavango 2010
