It’s 4 a.m. and we’re camped at Chobe Safari Lodge in northern Botswana. The coffee’s on and will be waking the family up in an hour so we can hit the road early today. We left Maun earlier in the week after the car repairs were finally complete to revisit Chobe as we thought we hadn’t really done the place justice the first time around (just after New Year’s) as we’d missed a few days due to Oliver’s hospital adventure. We drove through the Makgadikgadi Pans again but this time stopped at the fantastic Planet Baobab – a camp near Gweta, in the middle of nowhere. Someone had told us to avoid the place. I’m glad we didn’t listen to their advice. The pans are enormous dry lakes most of the year, and gigantic swamps at this time of the year. We had hoped that we’d be able to venture into the pans a bit but once within Planet Baobab camp it was pretty clear why that wasn’t going to happen in the rainy season… the camp itself is raised about 3 feet out of the swamp with raised paths between all the buildings and an amazing array of tadpoles, frogs, birds and insects in the surrounding swamp.
Planet Baobab is famous for its, you guessed it, baobab trees. In and around the camp, which is built on a swamp in the pans, are about 10 enormous baobabs – the eldest being 4500 years old. The camp itself was beautiful and eclectic: all traditional thatched huts and open spaces. We arrived after sunset and after much discussion and debate decided to break our “camping only” rule and check into a hut for the night. Arriving in darkness and rain qualifies as an emergency situation under which the “camping only” rule can be broken – that was my argument anyway.
We took the kids to the bar for a few hours before bed time. They had a great time with a bunch of twenty-something Australian, American and Swedish overlanders – climbing poles, playing bar-basketball and generally getting into the spirit of things with the “adults”. Ben and Hugo were buying drinks at the bar, climbing the wooden support poles, putting the drinks in the thatch roof and challenging the “adults” to retrieve them by climbing the poles too. True to form and good on ’em, the Australians were up for it. Well-lubricated, we all left the bar to go hug some baobabs with the overlanders…. wow, 18 people hand-in-hand around a baobab… they’re huge. After 40 solid days of camping, staying in a mud and thatch hut was a revelation. Mattresses, mosquito nets, toilet, shower – absolute luxury.
We left Planet Baobab to return to Chobe Safari Lodge for a few days. The road from Nata to Kasane (about 5 hours) is really bad: potholes, narrow and huge trucks. Add to those hazards elephants and giraffe that roam across the road – and you can consider yourself lucky to survive it.
We’re camped on the river with hippos about 10m from our tent, separated from them by only a feeble fence. The lodge is on the edge of the Chobe Nature Reserve so we have baboons, monkeys, crocodiles, warthog, hippos and the loudest, most obnoxious cacophony of birdlife you can imagine in and around the camp. Chobe Safari Lodge is great – a good mix of camping and not-so-much. We can lounge by the pool, eat in the restaurants, take boat trips out onto the Chobe River or head into the Chobe Nature Reserve. But we’re trying to resist the restaurants and stick to our, ahem, camping pledge.
We’re about half way through our trip (3 months was the vague timeframe with some flexibility) and absolutely nowhere near half way in terms of distance, so we’re going to start picking up the pace tomorrow. We’ve driven about 10,000 kms so far and if you look at a map, it looks like we’ve only done a quarter of the planned route. We leave for Zambia across the Kazangulu border ferry early in the morning and then off to the Zambian side of Lake Kariba and then to South Luangwa. From there we’ll head into Tanzania: Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti, Kilimanjaro and then down to Zanzibar. That’s the plan anyway….
Everyone’s still happy and healthy. The weather has been a mixed bag of rain, occasional sun and thunderstorms…Turns out we needed a lot less sunscreen and a lot more mosquito repellant than we had planned. And it hasn’t been too hot – mostly 25-30c – with hot spikes when the sun comes out.