I've been a bit slow writing up blogs and posting pictures of my recent trip, so here is a new entry.
Early the next morning, (5:30 wake up call) after our arrival at Baobab Lodge located on the edge of Chobe National Park in Botswana, we headed off on our first game drive of the trip. Being late fall in Africa, the nights and mornings were quite cold but by mid morning, the temps had warmed up nicely and, for the most part, we enjoyed temps in the mid to upper 80's....my favorite temperature range. Anyway, Chobe has a huge elephant population...one of the largest in Africa....about 45,000 of them, so we did see a lot of elephants, as well as many other animals. It was such a thrill to be driving down the road and suddenly see giraffe, impala, zebra, elephant, kudu, etc. along the side of the road, or crossing the road in front of us. To be able to see all this magnificent wildlife in their natural environment, living freely as nature intended, was a remarkable experience.
Following are a few pictures I took while on that first game drive. You'll see part of our group, bundled up due to the morning chill, waiting in the Land Rover to enter Chobe National Park, a female kudu, an African buffalo....this buffalo had a large gash in his neck and the two birds sitting on his neck were cleaning out the wound, a male kudu, giraffe, African fish eagle....these birds were magnificent......Egyptian geese, a baobab tree.....elephants will scrape at these trees with their tusks, eventually doing so much damage that the tree becomes top heavy and falls over.......impalas.....we saw hundreds of them. This is the African wilderness so coming across skeletons, dried out carcasses or random bones is not uncommon. We spotted an African buffalo skeleton, a mostly decomposed elephant carcass......we were told it was about 4 months old......and an elephant jaw bone. The rainy season had just ended a few weeks before our arrival, so there was a lot of water. Our Tour Leader, Manuel, told us that by the time the dry season ended, there would be only a bare trickle of this water left. On the horizon, of the first scenery shot showing the expanse of water, the opposite shoreline is the country of Namibia.
We headed back to camp for a delicious brunch, and some down time, before we'd go out for our afternoon sundowners game drive.
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