Botswana

Maun

So, after some indecision, we made the snap call of "Let's go to Botswana in the morning" and we did. We bit the bullet and paid the price for an expensive ride to Maun, the gate way to the Okavango Delta. From here we did an overnight mokoro (traditional dug out canoe, however, our's turned out to be an untraditional fibre-glass moulded one) trip to one of the thousands of small islands in the 'outer delta' area. Unfortunately the trip didn't live up to our expectations. We had envisaged this region to be teaming with wildlife, with elephants and hippos lurking around every bend. We did get pretty close (too close in fact) to the many spiders that lived amongst the reeds of the water lillies that our mokoro ploughed a new route through. Thankfully there were also some wonderful tiny frogs that almost distracted us from the uncomfortablly large spiders that were hurtling towards our faces. We asked our boatman if these spiders were poisionous. There was a long pause and then he answered "No." Then an even longer pause, "Not these ones."

Apparently, to see the real beauty of the Okavango Delta, you must take a flight into one of the exclusive lodges in the "inner delta" and as we all know exclusive is a synonym for expensive.
Interesting Botswana fact...as most of Botswana is situated in the Kalahari Desert, rainful is extremely important and precious, so much so that their currency, the Pula, is also the name for rain. And one Pula is divided into 100 Thebe or rain drops!

The other big attraction in these parts is the Chobe River, although you'd be almost guaranteed to see the elephants and hippos, we decided to take a break from the game viewing, and give our wallets a welcome break from the exclusive prices.

We took advantage of a cheap flight over the delta to Kasane and saved ourselves a couple of days of very slow travel on tretcherously cattle-infested roads. From here it was a quick drive to the Zimbabwean border.