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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Torun

The train ride from Warsaw to Torun was a little different as I spent the entire journey in the Cargo carriage, old west stole away style. I would like to say that this made it more exciting but it really didn't. The train was full and even though I had a ticket with a seat number and everything on it this really wasn't enough for rather large man who was in my seat and was two thirds of the way through a six pack (at 8 in the morning no less). The conductor wasn't getting paid enough to care so I found myself sitting on my backpacker surrounded by bikes and other unfortunate souls who were unlucky enough not to score a seat. My first problem with the Hostel I stayed at in Torun was that the directions were from 'a' train station, just not 'THE' train station. What was a 5 minute walk was actually 50. Once there I was greeted by no one. A few knocks on the door, a yell up stairs, a ten minute wait while looking through my guide book for some where else and f...

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...