Skip to main content

Okavango Delta

From our base campsite in Maun we drove in the back of the truck to the delta (Strangely passing a VB commodore on the way). Once there we were met by a number of pollers and their mokoros in varying degrees of waterproofness. I chose the safest looking for a very relaxing two hour trip up the delta to our campsite. From there we went on dusk and dawn walks. We were given instructions on how to act if we game across a rhino, lion, buffalo or elephant. Unfortunately those instructions were useless. Despite the presence of elephant tracks, elephant poo and elephant scratching posts our 'tracker' failed to 'track' an elephant or anything else for that matter.



In my free time i had a go at polling a mokoro (quiet please children). It's not nearly as easy as they make it look. I ended up tipping over and in the process breaking a pole. For the next two days i felt about as welcome as Michael Jackson at a wiggles concert.


The flight over the delta was an experience not to be missed, unless you were me.





Back in Maun was my first chance to use the internet since Swakopmund. Google took ten minutes to load so i didn't bother. I got told to come back tomorrow as it was unusually slow today. While in Maun two tourist operators had their minivans broken into losing pretty much everything from passports to cameras. This occurred during the day in front of the local shops bustling with people. A little reminder that you have to be careful everywhere.



The campsite we stayed at incidentally also doubled as a croc farm and had a bar, swimming pool and beach volleyball court. Not bad for the middle of Botswana.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Strung Treng

Strung Treng was an unexpected stop over, more a hospital visit then the usual tourist stuff. I was waiting in a guest house restaurant for the bus to Laos when i was rather suddenly overcome with a fever and fatigue. I rented a room and slept for almost 24 hours straight. The manger was understandably concerned, he thought it might have been Malaria, and sent me to the doctor for tests. It wasn't Malaria but was probably Dengue Fever but I needed a 10 hour bus trip back to Phnom Pehn to confirm this. Either way the 'cure' was Panadol, plenty of water and rest. I was going to do this in Laos anyway so decided against the bus back to Phnom Pehn and caught the bus to Laos the next day instead.
Post a Comment
Read more

Al Hudayda

I asked the hotel manager in Manakhah about getting to Al Hudayda. He assured me I just had to catch a taxi to Al Magraba on the main road and wait for a taxi to pass by. And so I waited. And waited. And waited but of course taxis don't leave Sana'a until full so I wasn't having much luck. Not that I minded much. I just sat in a road side cafe drinking tea,watching what was going on around me and answering the same three questions to anyone that cared to ask. With the help of a local I eventually managed to hitch a lift as far as Banjil. Turned out for the best really. Its must more comfortable on the bends when you have the back seat of a land rover to yourself. The drive out of the mountains along a wadi was quite impressive but once out of the mounatins the drive to Banjil and the shared taxi to Al Hudayda from there was like the drive from anywhere to Port Augusta. Long, flat, hot, featureless, boring. During the day Al Hudayda is dead. There might have been a bit going...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amasya

Lonely Planet suggested that Amasya is one of the prettiest towns in Turkey. Set in a mountain valley with a river running down the middle, I couldn't agree more. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves when I eventually post them. Once again the weather was perfect and it hadn't snowed here at all which was good because I had a lot of walking to do. It was a strange town. Mostly because it was one of the more modern towns I had come across, it almost had a cosmopolitan feel to it. But then there would be a horse and cart parked in the street. Most people spoke some English. They would come up to me (blond hair = foreigner), especially children and say hello, welcome, what is your name? where are you from? but that would be it as if that was as far as their grasp on the English language would go. This was excellent but as the conservation wasn't going to go any further (my Turkish matches their English) it made for a weird silence until one of us went on our way. I d...
Post a Comment
Read more