Tuesday April 15 - We depart Victoria Falls for a short day - about 90 km - leaving Zambia and entering Botswana, the seventh country for the Tour. The destination was Kasane, at the northeast corner of Botswana near where Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe come together. That entailed a ferry trip and a lot of waiting to get across the Zambezi River.
The crossing is served by two ferries that can carry only one transport truck at a time plus one or two smaller vehicles which by my guess gives the border crossing a capacity of at most 8 transports an hour. And trucks are lined up for several kilometres on both sides of the border. You have to get your feet wet to get on.
Botswana has vast expanses of wilderness that are home to significant numbers of animals and birds. We were able to get on a sunset cruise on the Chobe River to observe wildlife along the edge of Chobe National Park, one of Botswana's wildlife reserves, greeted early on by this silhouette of an elephant on the shore.
Another elephant demonstrated its swimming skills with a hitchhiking egret on its back...
...but hippopotamus can't swim...
...yet they spend all day in the water!
A late afternoon shower was illuminated by the setting sun giving us a nice rainbow...
...while a cormorant was drying its wings on the other side of the boat.
Along with one of our fellow riders, Eugene Garver from Minneapolis, we took four days off from cycling to see some more of Botswana's wildlife starting on Wednesday morning with a three-hour excursion by land rover in Chobe National Park.
The highlight was these lion on the riverbank, drinking as if it's a long time between water stops.
Amongst other sightings was this impala...
...and this one with a hitchhiker on its back...
...and mongooses (or is it mesgeese) digging ants out of the sandy soil. We had dozens of them around the campsite last night too.
Young baboons often cling to mom under her belly. This one is piggy-backing on her back.
This Redbilled Hornbill was back at the campsite.
We were back at the campsite at 0900 and now had to figure out how to get to Maun. The last bus of the day is at 0800 and we didn't want to spend all day in Kasane. The people at Thebe River Safari (the operators of the campsite) were terrific, found us a flight leaving at 1230, and took us out to the airport at 1100.
1 comment:
Fantastic animals and birds. Glad to see you are just tourists for a few days. Can't keep from flying I see !!!
Glenn
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