Sunday, November 6, 2016

Northern Botswana, A Cornucopia of Wildlife



Upington, South Africa, October 9th

We have been lingering here in Upington for a few days now as our first loop around Southern Africa nears its end next week.  I probably should have written more blog posts, but there always seems to be something else that needs doing.  We only left Botswana a week ago, and we already miss it.  It was such an amazing country to travel through that I think I will split the blog post about it into two or three bite-sized chunks, rather than one huge War and Peace-style omnibus edition.

Chobe, the greatest collection of elephants in Africa
Entering Botswana from Zambia on Friday, September 2nd was like moving between two separate worlds.  On the Zambian side, all is chaos and unpleasant touts and hassle.  Once on the ferry, peace returns and the Botswanan side of the border is quiet and orderly and efficient.  It took very little time (and much, much less money than was the case in Zambia) for us to pay for our Temporary Import Permit and third-party car insurance.  A quick shopping stop in downtown Kasane and we were settling into our campsite just outside town, Kwalape Lodge. 

It's heartening to see lots of baby elephants in Chobe
We had heard horror stories about how hard it was to get camping reservations in Botswanan national parks, and how we wouldn’t be allowed into the parks without reservations.  We had ended up paying quite a lot of money for camping reservations for 9 days around Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve, with the plan being that we would drive the sandy track linking the two.  The plan was to spend 4 nights camped on the Chobe River in a couple of campsites not far outside the national park boundaries, then have a long, hard day of driving to get to Moremi Game Reserve, where again we would camp just outside and do day trips into the reserve.  It was kind of a goofy itinerary, dictated by the impossibility of getting camping reservations at the key stopover campsite of Savuti, or indeed at any public campsite in Chobe or Moremi.
Kudu buck running beside the Chobe River
The trip started out well, with a day spent driving through the Riverfront sector of Chobe National Park, where we had spent a memorable 24 hours back in March along with a party of Japanese high school students on a humanitarian service trip at the Olive Tree Learning Centre in Livingstone.  Chobe is, to my mind, the single most impressive collection of big game in all of Africa.  The banks of the Chobe River, a tributary of the Zambezi, are thick with huge herds of game:  red lechwe, impala, zebras, buffalo, kudu, waterbucks and, especially, elephants in prodigious numbers.  Plenty of predators stalk this food supply, and the birdlife is awesome.  We were looking forward to a repeat performance this time around.
Giraffes just don't look graceful bending over to graze!
We left our campsite by 8:15 and by 9:15 we had entered Chobe, having paid for 5 days’ entry.  All we had heard about not being allowed into the park without accommodation vouchers proved to be inaccurate; the national park folks weren’t at all fussed about where we were staying, and were very welcoming to day visitors.  We turned down towards the river, then proceeded through huge numbers of elephants, along with big herds of giraffes, impala and zebra.  There was even a big herd of sable antelope, the species which we had searched for in vain in Kasanka (northern Zambia) a month before.  The landscape had changed; it hadn’t rained for five months, and the bush was tinder dry away from the river.  Almost all the animals in the park seemed to be out on the riverbank, grazing on the grass and drinking the water.
Sable antelope at last!
The birdlife was certainly less numerous than it had been in March, when thousands of migratory birds were present, but there were still lots and lots of species, particularly waders, egrets and herons.  There were pink-backed and great white pelicans (both new for us), several types of storks, spur-winged and Egyptian geese, red-billed teal, spoonbills, African and lesser jacanas (the latter a new species for us) and many more.  As always, there were so many species, and so many individual animals, that it felt like trying to drink from a firehose.  We spotted three well-fed lions lying comatose under a tree, with four other game drive vehicles clustered around; sleeping lions are not the most interesting of subjects, so we soon gave up and headed further along the river.
Roan antelope out for a jog, Chobe
Towards early afternoon, after hours of happy photographing and bird-spotting, we finally reached the far western end of the Riverfront sector and turned inland on a very sandy track to do the last 5 km back to the paved road.  It was much, much sandier than anywhere else we had gone, so it wasn’t surprising that we got ourselves thoroughly stuck in the sand, especially as we hadn’t let as much air out of our tires as we should have.  What was surprising, and a bit alarming, was that when Terri put Stanley into low-range four-wheel drive, nothing happened:  the wheels didn’t get any power at all, and we just sat there with the engine revving.  To make it even more alarming, ominous squeaking and grinding noises came from the gears.  We put it in high-range four-wheel drive and I started digging, but before we could get ourselves out, a game drive vehicle came from the other direction and very kindly offered to pull us out.  We pulled out our towing strap, and within a couple of minutes, we were free.  Terri drove very carefully up to the gate and the pavement, and we crawled the 18 km to Mwandi View, a beautiful little campsite on the banks of the Chobe River run by a personable South African named Anton. 
An impala utterly unfazed by our presence
Mwandi View was really a lovely place to stay, with abundant birdlife and sweeping views over the river into Namibia; sunset was spectacular, not just because of the great coppery flames of colour reflected on the river, but also because of the astronomical numbers of quelea birds flying back to their roosts for an hour around dusk.  Silhouetted against the red sky and the sun’s elongated disk, they darkened the sky in a continuous dense undulating stream, hundreds passing every second.  It was one of the most awe-inspiring sights of a trip that has been big on awe.  Queleas, a little finch, are the most numerous wild bird species on earth (with about 7 billion individuals, only domestic chickens live in greater numbers) and we had seen them before, but never in such prodigious profusion.  We sat there watching the sky slowly fade to black with a crescent moon near to Venus, and Jupiter closer to the horizon.  It was a place of sublime natural beauty, and it was hard to tear ourselves away to eat dinner.

Quelea darkening the sky at Mwandi View

The next day we were up early, breakfasting quickly on coffee, tea and rusks (the South African standby quick breakfast) and driving back towards the park by 7:10.  By 7:30 we were in the park, with Terri successfully navigating the sands that got us stuck the day before.  We kept Stanley in high-range 4WD and it seemed to work fine, especially with the tires further deflated to just over 1.0 bar of pressure.  There were no predators to be seen, but there was a huge herd of buffalo enveloped in a cloud of dust, a big herd of roan antelope, and a big male sable antelope looking majestic with his long, curving horns silhouetted against the sky.  
Buffalo herd in Chobe
Kudu and waterbuck mingled with impala and lechwe on the river plains.  There were lots of southern carmine bee-eaters, one of my favourite bird species with its brilliant red colours, and a few little bee-eaters with blue and green in place of red.  There were lots of fish eagles patrolling over the river, and little sandpipers along the banks.  Finally at 9:45 we stopped at a hilltop lookout to cook up a more substantial brunch of bacon, eggs, toast and fried tomatoes, looking out over huge herds of zebras below.  Commercial safari vehicles stopped by with their passengers, many of them paying many hundreds of dollars a day, and some of the passengers cast covetous eyes on our fry-up as they had tea and cookies. 

Terri and Stanley at our hilltop breakfast site

Replete, we headed back out in search of animals, heading away from the river to explore some inland routes.  It really wasn’t worth the effort, as the tinder-dry bush was bereft of game except for a handful of elephants. As we bumped downhill back towards the river, a new sound began underneath Stanley, a grinding, clashing, squeaking noise that we couldn’t locate.  It sounded like a broken bearing in one of the front wheels.  Lots of Terri driving slowly while I walked along listening and looking didn’t show definitively what was wrong, so we gave up, watched giraffe and roan antelope for a while, then drove cautiously back through the sands to the gate and on to Mwandi View, worried about what was wrong with Stanley.  At higher speeds, the noise went away, but as soon as we slowed down or turned sharply, it returned.  We saw another magnificent male sable crossing the road close to Mwandi View:  what an imposing creature!
The deep sandy track that injured Stanley
Back at Mwandi View, we took counsel from Anton and from some of our fellow campers as to what might be going on.  The consensus was that we might had gravel stuck in a brake pad making the squeaking noise, but that something more dire might be going on in 4WD low-range.  We called Ken Webster, a mechanic in Kasane, who said that he was going to be in the area the next day and could come check out whether it was safe for us to keep driving.  We had another breath-taking sunset and quelea display, then barbecued our steaks at Anton’s excellent riverside braai setup under the stars while Anton regaled us with tales that had us in stitches.  We went to bed in a jovial mood but worried what Ken Webster might find the next morning.

Quelea silhouetted against a Mwandi View sunset
It took Ken quite a while to deal with the other vehicle that he had come to rescue just up the river, and we sat at Mwandi View looking out over the river, walking along to do some bird (and hippo) watching, and sorting through the hundreds of photos from the previous two days.  When Ken finally arrived, he had a look and a listen, and diagnosed that even in high range, our four-wheel drive wasn’t working at all, and that the squeaking noise was probably coming from the gear box and transfer case.  We arranged to drop the car off at his garage in Kazangula the next morning, and drove off to our new campsite, a few kilometres up the river at Muchenje.  Muchenje proved to be another good-value well-run campsite, although the views over the Chobe River weren’t as perfect as at Mwandi.  We decided not to go game driving, and spent the afternoon relaxing in camp, watching birds and chatting with our neighbours, a German couple whom we had met on the Kazungula ferry three days earlier.  They told us about once discovering that there was no oil in their transfer case after having work done on it in a garage in Zambia.  We listened and thought something like “luckily nothing like that would happen to us!”.  Terri and I spent some time on the internet trying to research what might be ailing a Mitsubishi Colt, but it was a slow, intermittent connection and we didn’t learn much for the investment of a couple of hours.  I made a beef curry for supper, then we sat and watched another great sunset and another flight of queleas before playing guitar and packing up for an early-morning departure.
Buffalo crossing the road in a cloud of dust, Chobe
Tuesday, September 6th was a long day but a good day.  We were awake by 6 and packed up and driving by 7, taking the paved transit road through the park straight to Kasane, arriving at Ken Webster’s garage by 8:15, even before he had arrived.  We dropped Stanley off to be investigated, took out our folding bikes and rode the 9 km back into Kasane to make use of our day without a car to do a boat trip on the Chobe River.  We used Kalahari Tours, the outfit that Terri has used for a decade for her student trips, and since we already had park permits for the day, it only cost about US$ 14 per person, a tremendous deal. 

African skimmer in flight
The boat trip was as fantastic as we had hoped.  Although the bird life wasn’t as overwhelming as it had been back in March, there were still lots and lots of species, including the African skimmer, a very pretty, fairly rare and (for us) new species.  There were big herds of red lechwe, big herds of elephants and (very sadly) a dying elephant lying in a puddle of water; our guide said he had been wounded by poachers, possibly across the river in Namibia, and that he was expected to die that day.  Other elephants stood around him, splashing him with water and, in the case of a very young elephant, lying down beside him.  As the other elephants eventually moved off, we heard them vocalizing, and it sounded very much like humans crying, which is very much what we wanted to do.  Botswana has been the biggest, safest sanctuary for elephants during the blood-soaked past ten years during which Africa’s elephant numbers have plummeted by 25%, as documented in the recent Great Elephant Census, but now poaching is starting to nibble at the edges of Botswana’s safe zone.  Some 19 elephants have been poached near or inside Chobe in the past couple of months, despite Botswana’s strict anti-poaching shoot-to-kill policies. 
Dying elephant with distressed comrades beside him
We spent a bit of time rescuing a boatload of Korean tourists whose pontoon had run aground in the shallows, before visiting more hippos, crocodiles and waterbirds.  The whole time we were on the boat, I felt as though I was in a BBC Nature documentary narrated by David Attenborough, with new wonders of nature around every bend in the river.  It was a perfect way to spend the day while Stanley underwent his checkup.

Helmeted guineafowl at Chobe

We returned to shore around noon, and cycled off for lunch at the Chobe Safari Lodge.  Terri was feeling unwell, so I left her there to rest while I cycled back to Kazungula to pick up Stanley.  Ken said that it was safe to drive Stanley to Maun the long, paved way around through Nata, but that he wasn’t able to solve the gear-changing issue.  He had checked the transfer case, though, and found that it had not a single drop of oil in it, so he suspected this was the root cause of all the problems.  We thought back to our conversation of the day before with the German couple and winced. 
Giraffes always look so supercilious!

We phoned the agency which had arranged our camping reservations, Mackenzie 4x4 in Maun, and managed to re-arrange our camping dates for the coming days so that we didn’t completely lose the expensive bookings.  Coincidentally, Ken Webster recommended Mac Mackenzie, of Mackenzie 4x4, as the man to fix Stanley once we got to Maun.  At 4 pm, we drove out of Kasane along the paved road, past elephants, giraffes and lots of tiny steenboks beside the road.  We were outside the boundaries of Chobe National Park, but it was still some sort of game reserve, and looked just as wild (and just as dry!) as inside the park.  We nearly hit a black-backed jackal that darted in front of the car, and had the same experience with a roan antelope.  There were lots of impalas, ground-hornbills, red-crested korhaans and plenty of zebras.  Just driving along the highway, we were seeing significantly more game than we had seen in two days in Kafue National Park in Zambia a few weeks before.
Contented young elephant at Elephant Sands
We watched sunset from beside the road, then drove on towards Nata in the gathering darkness, hoping for a place to camp.  Our GPS told us that there was a place named Elephant Sands about 50 km before Nata, and we turned off gratefully to camp there.  It was a popular place, and the reception area had lots of warnings of how to avoid alarming the elephants.  We didn’t see any in the dark, but we could certainly hear them.  Terri went to bed, still feeling unwell, but I sat up writing a blog post and sorting through photos until the animal sounds got more alarming; what sounded like a nearby lion roar sent me scuttling to safety inside Stanley with great alacrity!  (It turned out to be an elephant snuffling while drinking, amplified by the trunk being inside a water trough.)
Pachyderm skin, Elephant Sands
We woke up to find ourselves in a wonderful place the next morning.  Elephant Sands is a campsite/tented camp/cottage complex built around a waterhole to which a dozen or more elephants come every day for water.  They walk right through the campsite and spend hours at the waterhole, drinking, bathing and socializing.  We spent some time watching the elephants and trying, vainly, to sketch them.  Around us were the students of the Travelling School, whom we had last seen at Jollyboys Campsite in Livingstone; they were spending a week here doing classes.  We looked through their science text, compiled by the teacher, and were impressed by the choice of topics (ecology, wildlife behaviour, conservation) that could be directly related to the experiential learning going on at Elephant Sands. 
Elephant Sands, with the guest cottages right beside the waterho
We drove into Nata, a dusty crossroads, had a disappointing takeaway lunch, then headed out to the Nata Bird Sanctuary, on the edge of the great Sowa Pan.  Central Botswana was filled, millennia ago, with huge inland lakes that have slowly dried over the years, leaving seasonally flooded salt pans in their place.  Sowa Pan is part of the Makgadikgadi Pans complex, a huge, wild area that is a favourite among hard-core 4x4 adventure enthusiasts.  We wanted to have a tiny nibble of the pan to get a feeling for whether it was an area that we wanted to return to.  We drove into the bird sanctuary and along a deserted track, past a few wildebeest and zebras, to find ourselves at the shore of an extensive shallow lake.  I had thought that the pan would be dry in the middle of a drought, but there was quite a bit of water, with a number of pelicans bobbing about.  It was an unearthly, empty landscape that hinted at the infinite, and I could see how exploring Sowa Pan could appeal to lovers of wild spaces.  On the way out, we spotted a few ostriches and a distant secretarybird, along with larger herds of zebras and wildebeest.

Terri and Stanley on the shores of Sowa Pan near Nata
Ostrich seen between Nata and Maun
We drove back to the main paved road and zipped along towards Maun, passing more wildlife and the turnoffs to the Makgadikgadi Pans and Nxai Pans National Parks.  We got into the outskirts of Maun at the exact moment that our main fan belt snapped.  It took us a while to figure out why our battery was losing voltage and our engine was starting to overheat, but as we sat in the parking lot of an Engen service station, Jake, a passing mechanic who was driving home from work, rescued us and replaced the fan belt in the parking lot.  We were relieved and impressed and after paying him, we kept his number just in case we needed his services again in the future.  We made our way out of town to Crocodile Camp only to find it had gone out of business, and we ended up at Audi Camp, a well-run campsite about 10 km north of Maun.
Jake replacing Stanley's fan belt in the Engen parking lot

The next day we delivered Stanley to Mac Mackenzie’s workshop to investigate what was going on with the four-wheel drive.  It took his mechanics hours to open up the transfer case, which was completely seized up from the lack of lubrication.  Mac decided that since it was going to take a long time, he would outsource the work to the workshop of a friend of his, Mike.  
Stanley's saviours:  Jake and one of Mackenzie 4x4's mechanics

Since it would likely take several days to deal with whatever the problem was, Mac offered to rent us another 4WD, a Prado owned by his wife, to use in the meantime.  At $100 a day, it was pretty expensive, but this is about a third of the going rate in Maun, so it was a deal from our point of view.  We still had our accommodation bookings to use in the Moremi and Khwai area, and didn’t want to spend days cooling our heels in Maun instead of seeing wildlife.  We selected a small subset of gear from Stanley and loaded it into our new substitute-Stanley.  We borrowed a portable fridge from Mac, borrowed a heavy canvas safari-tent from his son, took some cooking gear, clothes and bedding from Stanley and returned to Audi Camp for the evening.

Stanley's 4WD being inspected at Mackenzie 4x4 

The next day, Friday September 9th, it took forever to get away from Maun, as we bought cables at an electrical shop to run the fridge from the cigarette lighter in the Prado, went to an ATM for cash, picked up our accommodation vouchers from Mackenzie 4x4, bought groceries, picked up our fridge from Stanley to replace the one that Mac had lent us (it stopped working an hour after driving away from his workshop the day before) and generally ran errands.  We finally drove out of town by 1:30 pm, headed north towards the fabled Okavango Delta.  The road was perfect asphalt for the first 30 km before turning into a sandy track.  The Prado, much more powerful and lightly loaded than Stanley, handled the sand with ease, especially with the tires partially deflated.  It took us a little over an hour, driving fairly quickly, to get to Kaziikini Camp (where we would spend the night) and then another hour to reach the South Gate of Moremi Game Reserve.  The park rangers gave us a quizzical look when we said that we wanted a day ticket that late in the day, but also gave us good tips on where to go with limited time (the Black Pools).  We asked about accommodation in the park’s campsite at the South Gate, and were not surprised that, although it was supposedly booked solid, there were tent sites available for the night if we wanted them.  As we’d paid for an expensive tent site already at Kaziikini, we said no to the offer, and resigned ourselves to a long drive back to camp after our game drive.
A couple of tsessebe near Black Pools

At first there was precious little game in the dusty bush to justify our long drive into Moremi, but as we got closer to the Black Pools and their life-giving water, there was suddenly a profusion of game:  red lechwe, our first-ever tsessebe (a type of hartebeest), ostrich, secretarybirds and zebras.  As we beat a hasty retreat towards the gate, trying to beat the 6:30 pm closing time, suddenly a large feline shape crossed the track in front of us, and we realized that it was a leopard, the first one that we had spotted entirely by ourselves. We sat and watched it for a while, trying to get decent photos and admiring the powerful build and surprisingly dark-coloured coat before reluctantly resuming our drive.  We stopped beside the road halfway back from the South Gate to Kaziikini to watch another brilliant African sunset, then continued to our campsite, arriving in the dark.   We passed a nightjar and a sandgrouse both roosting on the sand of the road, and saw slender mongooses hurrying across the track in front of us.  In camp, as we cooked, Terri spotted a couple of honey badgers wandering off into the bush; we watched them for a while, trying to get photos, happy to have seen them until we realized that they had quietly and efficiently pillaged our kitchen for bread and sugar. We also discovered that our fridge didn't run well off the cigarette lighter in the Prado; so much for cold beer and fresh meat!
Pearl-spotted owlet, Moremi South Gate 

We slept well and got up very early the next day for a big day of game driving:  our alarms went off at 5:20 and we were driving back towards the South Gate by 6:20, fortified by hot tea and coffee and dry rusks, the standard Afrikaner fast breakfast.  By 7:10 we were back at the South Gate where we saw a beautiful pearl-spotted owlet sitting on a road sign, and soon afterwards we were headed into the park toward the recommended game-viewing area of Xini Lagoon.  It proved to be a great choice, with dense clusters of herbivores eating the recently-burned vegetation with its green shoots.  We saw big groups of red lechwe, impala, tsessebe, zebra, buffalo, waterbuck and more.  At the shrinking water pools, we spotted lots of waterfowl skulking amongst the reeds.
A wildebeest at full tilt near Xini Lagoon

We returned to the main track and continued towards Third Bridge, an almost mythical location that is about as far northwest as you can drive into the Okavango along the Moremi Tongue of land at a slightly higher elevation.  At the campsite there, we stopped and fried up steak and potatoes for a substantial early lunch while we watched other vehicles brave the water crossing at Third Bridge, where swamp water drains over the road at a spot where slender logs have been laid to create a corduroy road surface.  We had heard a few horror stories of people getting stuck here, but after watching a few successful crossings, Terri had figured out an optimal line to take without getting bogged down.  We polished off our lunch and Terri hopped into the driver’s seat to take us across the “bridge” without the slightest problem.  We were glad to have the power and light luggage load of the Prado for this sort of water crossing.  
Red lechwe fleeing through the marsh at Paradise Pools

Once on the other side, we drove a bit further to Xakanaka and Paradise Pools, two areas that other tourists had raved about.  The scenery was spectacular, with flooded plains dotted with massive trees, and red lechwe and waterfowl frolicking in the water.  It really felt very prehistoric and peaceful and far from the madding crowds of the modern world.  It was hard to tear ourselves away and drive back along a different track, far from the waters of the delta and utterly devoid of large or medium-sized animals.  By 5 pm we were back at Kaziikini, where we were one of only two couples camped in the entire campground.  We showered (the shower areas were full of birds drinking from the drips of the shower heads, including lots of pretty parrots), ate and were in bed early, tired by a long but good day of wildlife viewing.
Paradise Pools, Moremi

Sunday, September 11th found us driving 60 km north along a fairly good sandy track that the Prado handled brilliantly, headed towards the Khwai River Community Nature Conservancy via our new campsite of Dijara.  The track had been recently graded, and we sped along at 45-50 km/h until just before Dijara, where we found the road blocked by deep water across the road and floundered around looking for detours in the bush; after one track petered out entirely, we found another, more heavily travelled route that brought us out on the other side of the flood.  Dijara proved to be a scruffy little campsite with a great riverside location, run by a pair of South African guys barely out of their teens.  We set up our tent,  cooked up some bacon and eggs and then drove off 15 km down the road into the Khwai to see some animals.
Impala drinking at Paradise Pools

The Khwai River Community Nature Conservancy is one of the unsung gems of northern Botswana.  We had heard about it from tourists driving the other way, and it lived up to its billing.  It’s a relatively small area, adjacent to the northeastern corner of the much larger Moremi Game Reserve, and it shares the same low-lying landscape and dense concentration of big game.  Technically, it is supposed to be open only to those people who camp at the Khwai’s campsites, but those campsites, like the ones in Moremi and Chobe, are booked up months in advance.  In practice, no effort is made to stop people like us camping just outside the boundaries of the Khwai and then driving in to see the animals.  Since no entrance fee is collected at the gate, the experience is free, although I think most tourists would be glad to pay a fee equivalent to that charged in Moremi.

All along the banks of the Khwai River the green vegetation draws vast numbers of big animals from the bone-dry surrounding bush.  We spent the afternoon meandering along the tracks beside the river, taking photos of large herds of elephants, giraffes, kudu, waterbuck, impala, zebra and even a few common reedbuck (our first since the Nyika Plateau in Malawi), while big pods of hippos wallowed contentedly in the water.  There was a wealth of waterbirds to be seen as well, and the entire atmosphere was one of peaceful tranquility in the Garden of Eden.  It was hot, and after a while we rested beside the track for an hour, sheltering in the shade of the Prado.  Our late-afternoon game drive was productive, yielding a leopard (seen at a distance across the river) and three contented lions sleeping under a tree, seemingly undisturbed by the nine safari vehicles clustered around them.  We drove back to Dijara along the road, stopping for roadside sundowners when the sunset caught us still 10 kilometres from camp.  We fried up some vegetables with cheese, onion and bacon and fell asleep early.

We woke up a bit late (6:45) the next day to the unwelcome discovery that Terri’s air mattress had sprung a leak.  We set off without breakfast back towards Khwai, keen to make the most of the early morning coolness.  Red-crested korhaans scuttled around in the dry brush beside the road as we approached the Khwai, and groups of elephants emerged from the bush to cross the road towards the river for a drink.  Giraffe and kudu appeared beside the road too, making the commute towards the Khwai more rewarding than our day of game-viewing inside Kafue National Park a few weeks before. 
Imposing waterbuck male, Khwai

Once inside the park, we drove slowly along the river, past fewer animals than we had seen the previous afternoon but still enough to be seriously impressive.  We identified a new bird for us, the long-toed plover, and watched a juvenile martial eagle beside the water, looking improbably huge.  We stopped to cook up some oatmeal for breakfast beside a river crossing, one that we had been warned about as being treacherous.  Once again Terri took notes on where commercial safari vehicles crossed, checking out their line, and once breakfast was done, she drove across smoothly and without incident, to her great relief. 
The Khwai leopards aren't shy about being seen!

The other side of the river had more kudu and impala, but we quickly spotted a cluster of safari vehicles not far from the crossing.  Reasoning that seeing more than three safari vehicles probably meant lions or leopards, we drove up to find a young female leopard up a tree.  We spent the next hour watching the leopard as she climbed down out of her tree and up into another, larger tree where she obligingly posed at the end of a branch while dozens of camera shutters clicked furiously away.  Terri got us into position when the leopard started walking across open ground, and we had the leopard walk directly past us at a distance of a few metres, giving us an unconcerned glance as she finally cut into deeper bush and away from the gathered paparazzi.  It was by far the longest and most action-packed leopard encounter we had had, and it gave us the chance to take some really high quality photos. 
You lookin' at me?

This one meeting by itself would have made our Khwai visit memorable, but there was more to come.  We spent the heat of the day (the daily temperatures had been climbing to uncomfortable levels ever since our arrival in Botswana) in our camp chairs in the shade of the Prado beside the river, watching nearby elephants and giraffes and waterbuck.  We cooked up some lunch and I sorted through photos, very happy with some of the images I had captured over the previous few days.  We chatted with a French couple in a custom-built camper built on an Iveco truck; it was immaculate, perfectly designed, well maintained and thoroughly out of our price range. 
Magnificent kudu buck showing off at Khwai

That afternoon we drove along the bank of the river, our progress agreeably halted by a herd of 25 elephants who blocked the road.  There were a couple of tiny babies in the group, and we sat and watched them running along, full of energy, trying to keep up with the long, slow pace of the adults.  We eventually made it past the obstructive elephants and recrossed the side channel, the Prado’s power and Terri’s accurate route-finding making it seem trivial.  On the other side, kudu bucks came and displayed their magnificent spiral horns and pelts, while waterbucks grazed in the water.  Across the main river in Moremi, a lioness was on the prowl and we watched her for a while through our binoculars.  Our youthful camp operators in Dijara had told us that none of their guests who visited Khwai had ever missed seeing a lion or a leopard, and we had seen both great cats on both of our visits, proof of the tremendous game viewing to be done in this little paradisiacal part of the Okavango Delta.  We ended a day of unforgettable game viewing with one of the best sunsets of the trip, the sun turning the river and its drowned trees the colour of molten copper.  We drove back to Dijara in the gloaming, overwhelmed by the beauty of the natural world.


The next morning, September 13th, was my birthday, and we awoke in our borrowed tent to the sound of hippos and plovers.  We cooked up our remaining bacon and eggs, packed up and drove back to Maun content with the four days of world-class wildlife safaris we had had.  Stanley was on the mend, which was a great relief, and we used the Prado one last time to buy groceries at our new favourite shop, Beef Boys, stocked with top-notch meat, veggies and deli items.  We returned the Prado to Mac, glad to have been able to use him while Stanley was out of action, and settled in for a few days in Maun. 

As Terri cooked up a feast at our digs at Laphroaig Cottages (without Stanley, camping at Audi was expensive and impractical, so we found indoor accommodation in town), we were glad that our first 12 days in Botswana had lived up to and exceeded expectations.  We looked forward to further adventures in the central and southern parts of the country, hoping that they could meet the impossibly high standard set by our travels through Chobe, Nata, Moremi and Khwai, and thankful for being lucky enough to experience all the Attenborough-esque wildlife that we had experienced.  My 48th year had been a great one, starting in Corsica and passing through Sardinia, Canada, the Falklands, South Georgia, the Antarctic Peninsula, Patagonia, the Carretera Austral, Paraguay, Uruguay, Buenos Aires, Zambia and now four and a half months of travelling in Stanley around southern Africa.  I hoped that my 49th year would be just as idyllic.  


Sunset at Khwai

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Stanley Explores Western Zambia


Mabuasehube Gate, Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, October 1

Elephant at our campsite, Mayukuyuku
I'm sitting in front of a crackling campfire here under the infinite starry canopy of the southern skies in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, listening to the yips of nearby spotted hyenas (the same guys who ransacked our camp garbage can last night, aided by a lone brown hyena), contemplating the past month of memorable travel here in Botswana, but also trying to recollect the details of our last three weeks in Zambia back in August.  It seems slightly incongruous to be sitting beside a campfire feeling like a San hunter-gatherer while simultaneously typing on a laptop, but such is the life of the 21st century travel blogger.

Lusakan Lassitude

The second half of our Zambian travels began with three days in Lusaka (August 8-10).  These three days were far less carefree and relaxing than our sojourn a month earlier had been, as I had to spend large chunks of two days trying to remedy our lack of a Customs Import Permit for Stanley.  We had failed to get one when we entered from Malawi, and by the time we got to Lusaka, we were long overdue.  The bureaucrats at the Zambia Revenue Agency hemmed and hawed and dragged things out, but finally managed to get the relevant papers processed after soul-destroying hours of waiting for a bribe of US$ 30 (the initial request was for US$ 100, but the official seemed pleased with the smaller amount).  Unfortunately the TIP was only valid for 15 days, meaning that we would have to renew it before we left the country, but at least we weren’t illegal anymore.  We also helped Rob, a volunteer who was going to help out in Livingstone at the Olive Tree Learning Centre, change money at the Bank of China’s Lusaka office; he had been working in China, and a combination of bad luck and bad timing meant that he had arrived in Zambia with only Chinese yuan as spending money, a currency not accepted anywhere in Livingstone.  He returned to Livingstone on the bus with a sewing machine in his luggage for Olive Tree to use in income-generating activities.

Pachyderm paunch:  our resident elephant at Mayukuyuku
Our last day was spent by me trying to get some niggling issues fixed on Stanley:  our reverse lights weren’t working (we had been fined for that by the police in Zimbabwe), and our rear differential lock wasn’t working either; as well I wanted our tires rotated, and our emergency brake and rear brakes needed to be tightened up.  Mr. Mzinga, the mechanic who had worked on Stanley in July, spent the day working on him again, this time out at his workshop in a hardscrabble community out on the outskirts of town.  In the end everything except the diff lock got fixed; that required a switch that could not be obtained.

My friend Nathalie arrived back in Lusaka in the middle of our stay; it was great to see her and catch up on happenings.  Once again we stayed at her house, although the last couple of nights there were extra people staying at Nathalie’s, friends of her colleague Vicky, so we slept out in Stanley in her parking lot instead.  We had a great evening of Indian food with Vicky and her friends (back from a month-long road trip through Botswana and Namibia) and Nathalie at Dil’s, a Lusaka institution that has pictures of George W. Bush eating there a few years ago.
Patient queues of voters in Lusaka's outskirts on August 11

Underwhelmed by Kafue

Defassa waterbuck in Kafue:  note solid white rumps
On August 11th we drove out of Lusaka late in the morning after a sluggish start.  It was election day, the culmination of a long and acrimonious campaign between the incumbent, Edward Lungu (whose campaign T-shirts we had obtained a few days earlier in Shiwa Ngandu, and whose campaign kept crossing paths with us in the north of the country) and the perpetual challenger Hikainde Hichilema.  We drove west out of town along a good road, past long queues of voters waiting patiently for their chance to exercise their democratic franchise.  It all seemed fairly well organized and cheerful and normal.  We drove west for 270 km towards Kafue National Park, one of the largest and best-known parks in Zambia.  It’s so big that it’s actually hard to get to some of the best areas (like the Basanga Plains in the north, which has no budget accommodation options anywhere within a 3-hour driving radius)), so we restricted ourselves to a small section near the main highway and stayed at Mayukuyuku Camp, right on the Kafue River about 10 km off the highway.

Puku, Kafue National Park



Egret in the sunset, Mayukuyuku
Mayukuyuku was a very pleasant place to stay, with a resident elephant who made life interesting at times, and lots of waterbirds and hippos in the river.  We had wonderful sunsets both nights, and on the 12th we went out for a game drive on the local trails.  To be honest, this section of Kafue was a bit underwhelming, with not much game to be seen.  We had heard that Kafue is a great place to see cheetahs, but we saw no sign of them.  In fact we didn’t see any large predators at all.  There were plenty of puku, the red-flanked antelope that is like a burlier version of the ubiquitous impala, as well as the impala itself.  We spotted a Defassa waterbuck as well, a subspecies of the common waterbuck without the usual white ring on its rear end.  We had a great dinner of lamb, corn and sweet potatoes and I sat out under the stars playing guitar late into the evening. 

Lichtenstein's hartebeest
The next morning we drove out along the main highway west towards Mongu, passing through the centre of the national park.  On the way we saw more Defassa waterbuck and a new species for us, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest, as well as wooly-necked storks and spur-winged geese.  Overall, though, I didn’t think Kafue was worth the effort and expense (about US$ 180 for the two of us to camp two nights and spend two days in the park), as it didn’t offer much game that we hadn’t already seen elsewhere, and since (outside the camps) persistent tsetse flies mean that you have to keep your windows rolled up on the vehicle.  I think that if we had given Kafue more time and had gotten further into the interior, we might have found it more impressive, but we didn’t. 

Wallowing Through Liuwa Plain

At the pontoon ferry to Liuwa Plain
We ended up driving 424 km that day, all the way to Liuwa Plain National Park, along a generally excellent road (with one fairly awful section just outside the boundaries of Kafue). We bought fuel and restocked our fridge in Mongu’s huge new Shoprite, and then drove out of town along a brand-new road to Kalabo, a remarkable feat of engineering that cost over US$200 million to build.  It cuts what had once been 8 hours of grinding through deep sand along miserable tracks and through alarming river crossings to 50 minutes of driving pleasure, along the Barotse Plains, the floodplains that border the Zambezi River as it flows south from its sources in the northwestern tip of Zambia and in the Angolan highlands.  We were in Kalabo by 4:30 pm, getting our park permits for Liuwa Plain. 

Stanley on the Liuwa Plain
This (formerly) remote park is administered by African Parks, the same private trust that runs the Bangweulu Wetlands as well as parks in Rwanda and the DRC.  We paid our money (US$ 200 for three nights and two days in the park, including camping), caught the hand-pulled cable pontoon ferry across the river and set off for our first campsite.  It took us only 200 metres to get stuck the first time in deep, deep sand, although a small posse of local villagers soon pushed us clear again after some energetic digging.  It was the deepest sand we had seen since long ago in Paindane, Mozambique, and it was a foretaste of what was to come over the next few days.  We got to Kayala campsite, two kilometres from the ferry, had a fiery sunset, and popped the roof on Stanley.  We had a great show in the evening sky as all five classical planets were visible:  Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn (in order from lowest to highest in the sky) were all in the western half of the heavens.  It felt good to be completely alone on the plain; there were no other campers (the entire park gets only about 500 visitors a year) and the campsite caretaker was away at a funeral. 
Liuwa Plain sundowners
Terri at the wheel

We slept well and awoke at 7, just after sunrise.  We had a delicious breakfast of oatmeal, then packed up and headed further north into the park by 9 o’clock.  It was a seriously difficult stretch of sand driving, with minimal signs, deep soft sand and a confusing spider’s web of interlinked tracks requiring split-second decisions about which fork in the “road” to take. Stanley bucked and swayed alarmingly as we drove along the rutted tracks, bouncing alternately to each side. We got seriously stuck twice, involving lots of digging by me followed by pushing while Terri tried to drive out of the sand trap.  Just after our second escape, we were grinding through the sand when there was a sudden loud crunch under the car.  We thought at first that we had hit a hidden rock, but there are no rocks to hit, so we got out to see what was wrong.  A small drip underneath turned out to be the air conditioning (like all AC, it drips slightly with condensation on the outside), so we started to drive again, but there were still horrible grinding noises from under the car.  Further investigation showed that one of the rear shocks had sheared off the bolt that attaches it to the leaf springs, and the shock was now hanging loose and useless below the car.  I crawled underneath and removed the bolt that was attaching the top of the shock to the chassis, threw the mangled shock into the back and we continued along our way.  After two hours of intense concentration, grinding along in 4WD low range, we had covered about 25 km and arrived at Kwale campsite, where we cooked up bacon, eggs and tomatoes on toast and contemplated our next move.

Stanley breaks a shock
We had a reservation for a more distant campsite, Katoyana, for that evening, and were scheduled to spend the second night at Kwale, but given the broken shock and how slowly we were moving, we decided that it would be best to stay the night at Kwale.  Talking to the friendly campsite attendant, we learned that about 20 km away, at Matamanene camp, there was a mechanic who might be able to help us with the shock.  We set off early in the afternoon and had another miserable drive, getting stuck again and struggling to make headway in the deep sand.  At least we had bird life to look at:  crowned cranes and wattled cranes, both fairly rare and endangered, were out on the plain; we had seen them in Bangweulu, but we had lost the photos when my camera card malfunctioned, so it was nice to get photos of them again.  There was also a korhaan (a smaller version of the bustard) and lots of herds of zebras, although domestic cattle from the local villagers living in the park were definitely displacing the zebras near the villages.

We finally arrived at Matamanene at 4 o’clock to find that there was no mechanic.  We talked with Dan, the young Dutch biologist who runs the Liuwa Plain Carnivore Project, who gave us the name of a good mechanic in Mongu and said that we wouldn’t damage Stanley further by driving without the shock.  We thanked him and set off back towards Kwale along a more direct track.  We were finally out of the dense forest that we had been in since the ferry crossing and got out onto the open plains for which Liuwa is known.  Every year in about November the second-biggest gathering of wildebeest in the world takes place here as the rainy season starts in earnest.  The wildebeest gather from the highlands of Angola and areas in Zambia outside the park, where they spend most of the year.  We had heard that we wouldn’t see the big wildebeest herds, but that we should see lots of hyenas and other game.  As we drove along the track (still sandy, but not as soft and deep as before, so we could actually make forward progress), trying to navigate back to Kwale using vague directions from Dan and his employees and minimal help from our temperamental GPS, we saw a few lone male wildebeest here and there, more zebras and, just before dusk, one lone hyena.  Sunset found us still 12 km from Kwale, so we decided to sleep out on the plain rather than pushing on through the dark.  It was a memorable night under the stars, after a beautiful sunset, and we got into bed in Stanley fairly early as we heard the yipping of hyenas around us in the dark.

Crested and wattled cranes
We woke up the next morning to an unusual sound, like someone clapping their hands together very, very quickly.  It took a while to locate the source, which proved to be the Eastern clapper lark, a bird which displays every morning by clapping its wings together, first on the ground (where we didn’t see them, hidden in the grass) and then in the air, flying steeply upwards for a good clapping session, before gliding back to the ground.  We cooked up a hearty pancake breakfast to give us energy for more sand digging, then drove back to Kwale via a few seasonal waterholes that were listed (with their GPS co-ordinates) in our excellent Bradt guide to Zambia.  It’s been a very dry year in Zambia (and most of southern Africa), so the waterholes were mostly dry.  We had a good morning of watching wattled cranes:  they really are magnificent birds, especially in flight.  Our GPS had another bad morning, sending us in random directions and even losing track of where south was, but we eventually got back to Kwale and set up camp under the shade of some tall trees.

Bathroom bats, Kwale campsite
We ended up spending the rest of the day in camp.  We couldn’t face more sand driving, and there was plenty of birdlife to be seen in the woods.  The campsite looked out over the open plain, but there was almost no mammal life to be seen; I think that if we had managed to drive further north, as was the original plan, we would have seen more animals, but as it was, it was slim pickings.  The camp was a pleasant place to spend time, though; we were the only inhabitants, other than the friendly caretaker, and we took advantage of the hot showers to wash off the thick layer of sand that covered most of our bodies, meeting the resident bats that hung upside down beneath the shower roof.  We cooked up a big chicken curry over the campfire, letting it simmer all afternoon into a delicious thick sauce.  I went for an afternoon run across the plain, keeping a wary eye out for lions (there are very few in the park) and not seeing much wildlife in the grasslands.  Another pretty sunset was followed by some fruitless spotlighting for nocturnal birds; we could hear owls and nightjars, but could not find them.
Villagers on the move across Liuwa Plain
Spot the "road":  on the way back to the ferry
The next morning we woke up to find the enormous footprints of a male lion that had wandered through in the night (making me feel less clever for having gone running the previous afternoon!), breakfasted on oatmeal, then drove back to the ferry crossing.  It was easier going, as we chose a better track than the first time, but there were still long sections of tough sand slogging that Terri handled with aplomb.  Along the way we passed local villagers trekking towards the ferry in long caravans of ox-carts, dressed in colourful clothing that contrasted picturesquely with the golden grass.  Within two hours we were back at the ferry, without having had to dig ourselves out once.  It was an indescribably relief to reinflate the tires from their 1.0 bar half-flat condition so necessary in soft sand to 3.0 bars and then drive back onto asphalt.  We drove back to Mongu along the lovely new road, bought some food at Shoprite, utterly failed to find the mechanic recommended by Dan the carnivore man, and drove off towards Livingstone with one missing rear shock.

Made it!  Stanley waits for the pontoon
Overall Liuwa Plain was interesting, but didn’t quite live up to its hype.  I found it more interesting than Kafue, and seeing the wattled cranes was a big bonus, but the difficulty of driving in the deep sand, coupled with the lack of much game to see, made it not such a compelling place to visit.  My favourite parts of the visit were the night spent out on the plain, and the afternoon in Kwale camp.  I think that Liuwa Plain would be worth visiting later in the season, and with a lightly loaded, more powerful 4x4 like a Land Cruiser or a Pajero.  Stanley definitely struggled with the conditions!

Zipping down the Zambezi

Lovely barbecue spot overloking the Zambezi
It was an easy drive south along the Zambezi on a brand-new asphalt road in perfect condition.  It is such a new road that it doesn’t appear on our Tracks 4 Africa GPS map, which spent much of the trip complaining that we were off the road; the old road ran on the right bank of the river, but we zipped along the left bank, bypassing towns that were on our map and making great time.  At 3:40 we crossed a new bridge across the Zambezi and found a new campsite, the Sioma River Camp, to spend the night.  

Zambezi sunset in Sioma
It is perched high above the Zambezi, which here runs through a steep-sided gorge on its way downstream from the Ngonye Falls.  There was a lovely swing seat in the garden to lounge on, and a barbecue platform perched out over the river that was the perfect sunset-viewing spot.  It was one of those unexpectedly lovely places that is always a pleasure to stumble upon.
Ngonye Falls


The next day, Wednesday August 17th, was going to be our last day of driving for a while, as we were bound for Livingstone.  We stopped in to see the Ngonye Falls:  they’re pleasant enough, but don’t hold a candle to the majesty of Victorial Falls.  We were in and out of the falls before the ticket man showed up late for work, saving us the admission price.  Most waterfalls in Zambia are classed as national monuments, meaning US$15 per person, plus a similar amount per vehicle, but I think that Ngonye Falls is run by the local government, so it might be cheaper.  The local council got its own back, though, a few kilometres down the highway where they run an extortion racket, extracting 65 kwacha (US$ 6.50) for any foreign vehicles that pass their roadblock.  Terri was incensed by this legalized highway robbery; it’s a good thing that other local councils around the country don’t follow suit, or you wouldn’t be able to afford driving down the road.  It’s not a road toll, per se; it’s just a tourist levy to cross the territory controlled by the municipal council of Sioma.

The rest of the drive south was uneventful, passing through some very pretty countryside indeed, until the town of Sesheke, where the road runs into the Namibian border.  From that point to the Botswanan border town of Kazungula, the asphalt of the road has disintegrated entirely, meaning that it takes three hours of careful navigating between car-sized potholes to drive the 130 km on this stretch, with the central 85 km being particularly awful.  At Kazungula the pavement returned to its usual immaculate state and we cruised into the familiar surroundings of Livingstone, where we had spent three weeks back in March.  We went straight to our favourite restaurant, Olga’s, for a celebratory lunch, then contemplated where to stay.  We knew that we would end up spending most of our stay at Jollyboy’s Campsite, but we wanted one night out of town.  We looked at the Waterfront, but its campsite was heaving with no fewer than seven overland trucks, as peak tourist season was upon us.  We found a much quieter spot at Maramba River Camp, then went out for sundowners at the Royal Livingstone, Terri’s favourite place in all of Livingstone.  It was good to be back in our familiar home away from home.
Happy at the Royal Livingstone

Lingering in Livingstone

Stanley, Terri and some OTLC pupils and staff
Volunteer family extraordinaire:  Jo and Rob and their 5 children
Digging the new latrines 
The next two weeks passed by remarkably quickly.  Rob and Jo, Terri’s friends from New Zealand, were in Livingstone to volunteer at the Olive Tree Learning Centre, and Jo did a lot of work on the fund-raising website for the school, deploying her impressive graphic arts and web design skills on the project.  Rob and their five children worked both at OLTC and at another school most mornings, playing with children and doing physical labour on the ongoing construction at OTLC.  Sadly, their volunteering stint was curtailed by a thief who managed to steal a huge sum of Chinese yuan cash from their hotel room; since that money was their travel money, they ended up changing their plane tickets to return to New Zealand early, a big loss both to them and to the OTLC project.  Apparently it was the fifth case of theft at that same lodge in less than a month, making it likely that it was an inside job either by the owner or by an employee.

The heart of any good school--OTLC inaugurates its new library
It was good to see the changes at OTLC since we left town in early April.  The new school building that was paid for by fundraising efforts at Terri’s former school, the Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS), is now complete; the last windows and door gates went into place while we were there, along with electrical fittings.  Terri spent a lot of time huddled with the school’s business manager, going over accounts and trying to set the school on a path to financial sustainability, since KLAS will end its decade-long tradition of sending a student humanitarian service trip to Livingstone.  It was good to see the school expanding and moving in new directions, with the sewing machine and some donated computers being deployed in income-generating activities, and new teachers joining the fold.  Jo gave a great professional development session to the teachers.  We broke ground on new latrines for the students, and inaugurated the library, a sorely needed resource in a community virtually without access to books.  We even watched a partial solar eclipse one morning while working on the new sandpit for the schoolyard.  There is an air of progress and optimism in meeting new challenges that is heartening to see, particularly for Terri who has spent the past decade cultivating the skills of the people who run the school.  We spent some time setting up a sponsorship program to allow people to sponsor a child for a year at the school; taking photos of the children, and writing up their biographies, I realized again how lucky I have been in my own life, being born where I was, when I was to the parents that I have.  
The boss gets her hands dirty during OTLC construction
I won the genetic lottery; some of these students did not, and OTLC represents a chance to give these young minds a bit more of a head start.  The project has been going for long enough that Terri can start to get positive feedback about how well her pupils do after they leave OTLC and move into government primary schools.  It’s been a rewarding experience for me to play a small part in this project, and I look forward to doing so again in the future.  I think Terri can be proud of the help that she has given to children in a tough neighbourhood of Livingstone.
Rob putting his back into construction at OTLC

Jo giving some tech professional development to OTLC teachers
Spaces between leaves make pinhole images of the eclipsed sun
Our time in Livingstone wasn’t all work and no play.  We found time to go whitewater rafting, and it was an exciting full-day trip down some pretty big rapids indeed.  Neither Terri nor I went overboard, although one of our raft-mates did, while one of the other rafts flipped completely and it was some very shaken, scared rafters that we helped to pull out of the river downstream.  
Yes, that's an anti-malarial bednet being used as a fishing net!
We also went abseiling and hiking in a side canyon of the Zambezi while other, braver folks hurled themselves off the Gorge Swing.  I found a tennis court and a tennis partner, Darlington, and spent several happy afternoons playing.  The courts were in terrible condition, and the tennis balls were worse, but it was so much fun, good for my soul.  I got out running most afternoons, and we spent several evenings having sundowners at the Royal Livingstone, watching the sun turn the Zambezi various incredible shades of copper and gold. 
Terri abseiling outside Livingstone

Kids enjoying the new sandpit at OTLC
We met interesting people staying at the campsite as well.  The cyclists of the Joburg2Kili charity ride kept us amused for a few days when we first got to Livingstone.  
Tbe Joburg2Kili cycling team



The new school building at OTLC
Justin, our builder, finishing off the windows

Maya (the Land Rover), Cristelle and Terri
Cristelle, a French woman who has been travelling and working on various small-scale humanitarian projects for several years in Africa, in her trusty Land Rover named Maya, was a source of great information and inspiration.  Douglas and Keira, an Irish couple in another Land Rover, gave us lots of tips for our trip through Botswana and South Africa.  And the teachers and students of the Travelling School, a 16-student, 4-teacher high school semester abroad program that moves through Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa over the course of 4 months, gave Terri and me inspiration to think about setting up a similar program ourselves in the future; we’ve spent numerous nights around the campfire talking about it.
Child labour:  photogenic pupil Shawn hard at work



We also had some work done on Stanley, getting the rear shocks replaced (it was a long process, as the right shocks were not to be found and other shocks needed to be modified to fit our Colt) and trying to repair the rear differential lock (the right switch could not be found).  We extended both our visas and our CIP for Stanley (remarkably, both were free of charge and involved little bureaucracy and no demands for bribery, a welcome change from other encounters with the Zambia Revenue Authority).  And then, suddenly, it was September 2nd and we were driving to the Botswana border crossing at Kazungula, keen to head into the wildlife centre of Africa.  It had been a wonderful five weeks in Zambia, but it was time to move on to fresh adventures.
Terri, our sign painter and the KLAS logo on the OTLC wall

The essence of sundowners at the Royal Livingstone
Another Zambezi sunset
How I will always remember Livingstone