Machaba Camp Moremi Game Reserve

... to the river.. Lisa spots some birds and grabs the Bino’s (normal!) as we gaze happily at the birds (yep they were Brown Birds) I notice something in the water.. bugger me 4 Hippo’s I screech with joy .. Lisa is unsure what to do as she is already in the vehicle, she recons she was looking for the camera!!.. then 3 young bull Elephants stroll in to have a drink.. Unreal.. I cautiously view behind the vehicle thinking what the hell else is going to pop up ...

... 50 yards out. Their guide had told everyone to group together and then he had waved his hands wildly until eventually the lion veered off. But what’s funny is that we had had that same guide the night before and I had asked him what you were supposed to do if a Lion charged, he said "stand your ground and look them in the eye, don’t make a lot of struggling movement." Put in practice though he apparently waved his ...

... Hollie & Chris (who were in the same kind of Mokoro as us). Our Mokoro was made of wood only, while the others had a fiberglass cover with sides that went up much higher and were waterproof. At various points our poler would stop poling to bail out water from the back! After about an hour and a half one of the polers spotted an elephant and suddenly everyone was heading in that direction. It was huge, with big ...

... ultimately failed in our main quest to find predators. Ok, so you can obviously tell from the pictures that we eventually found some predators but I'm building up the drama here so bear with me. The rains had been particularly heavy earlier this year so there was a little concern that perhaps there's too much water, causing the wildlife to be dispersed all over the park and not concentrated around dwindling water supplies as happens at the tail-end of the dry season ...

... it is very difficult to judge the depth and my worry was that if we got stuck we would have to wade in waist deep to push the car out. Luckily we were careful and went round the wet areas where we could. Still obsessed with finding big cats we decide to go down to the hopefully named - Lion's Den Pan. Alas there were no lions and we were running out of days. Back at camp we decided to play a few hands of ...

... The broken down lorry had caused some damage, but this was not a problem, a few more logs were piled on top and it was fixed - or so we hoped. Bravely we let someone else go on it first, just to check it was indeed safe and wasn't about to disintegrate the moment we drove onto it. Then it was a minute of the most bone-shaking metres we had ever driven. The logs seemed to rattle and spin beneath our tyres, were we to have survived a road accident only to be swept away ...

... and doesn't run into any ocean, instead it gets soaked up by the Kalahari Desert. It is currently seen as being in environmental danger due to the Angolans in the North attempting to dam up one of the main rivers to create electricity and sell it to neighbouring counties. A lot of people are worried that one of the most spectacular environments for wildlife in the world could be destroyed if the Angolans continue with their project. I counted myself lucky then to be ...

... May 16: Today started with a hangover and breaking camp and loading the mokoros for an 0800 departure. We made it back to the mokoro camp by 1000 and got back in the truck to take us to the camp in Maun again. We returned to camp to find lunch ready and then proceeded to have a mad dash for the showers. The delta was a purely bush camp so there were no shower or bathroom facilities so for two and half days we didn't shower or change ...

... Amoung The Gum Trees!) "Give me a home among the boabab trees With lots of palm trees An elephant or two and some lion poo A bush toilet out the back A macorro out the front And an old camping chair!" The next morning we travelled back to Maun in the Mokoros, and open air ...

... accessible by car (which is a good thing, because it means the camp is more in the middle of the wilderness). Al and I had our own tent, which was a raised wooden platform with a wooden roof and tent-style walls. It was actually quite luxurious, for being in the middle of the veldt. The camp owns a bunch of land in the area, so no one else is allowed on the land to look for game (a huge plus), and our camp is located right on this big lagoon ...