Africa Part One

The last chance I had to update my blog properly was after the white water rafting in Victoria Falls. That afternoon we got to visit the falls proper. It was low water season, so the falls were not nearly so impressive as they would be during the high water season, although that meant I could actually walk out from the shore and take a peek over the edge of the waterfall... not completely safe though, as the answer to the question of why there were so many African people hanging around... was that a local girl had been swept or fallen off the falls, and they were still trying to find her body... yikes!

I also had a disaster of sorts. There were a few baboons around the national park. A couple of years ago in South Africa one of my fellow travellers had been badly bitten by a baboon, trying to retrieve her backpack from a baboon that had taken a liking to it. Well, imagine my concern when I put my backpack on the ground to take a photo of Mojito in front of the falls... and a baboon wandered over to see what he could find to eat inside my backpack... luckily I had locked it, but my laptop/plane ticket / one of my passports / money / etc was about five feet away from being thrown over the edge, down hundreds of metres into the Zambezi river!!! That was a bit scary... do I try to get my bag back and risk a nasty injury, or do I just hope the baboon gets bored and moves on??? luckily it was the latter... even if my heart stopped for a minute or two.

After Victoria Falls, we took a rather dodgy ferry across the river to Botswana, where we camped near the Chobe National Park. The wildlife was not nearly as plentiful as expected, but we still took a sunset cruise and saw some interesting animals, particularly the elephant who obliged us with some wonderful sunset photos...

After only a couple of days in Botswana, we crossed into Namibia, where we spent a couple of days in the Okavango Delta region. One afternoon, we took some dugout canoes down the river. Some of you may know that hippos are the biggest animal killers of human beings in Africa... well, let's just say you don't want to be in a dugout canoe when a hippo decides that you are invading his space!!! Luckily it was just a mock charge (according to the guide), but when a hippo 15 metres away decides to stand up and run a couple of metres towards you... well... it is supposed to be an adventure holiday!!!! (and, yes, I am in the canoe the hippo is apparently heading towards!!)

After surviving the hippos, it was nice to visit a local village, when a European NGO had recently paid for the building of a new school, and the kids thought it was great fun to interact with all these white people carrying fancy digital cameras and the like...