Botswana: What's it Like?

Driving outside of the city limits can be challenging, and at night it is down right dangerous. One of the reasons for this is the large number of donkeys running loose. The Batswana use them to pull wagons like you can see here. In rural areas this is one of the main forms of transportation. When the donkeys are not pulling a wagon, they can usually be found grazing on the side of the road. If you hit one of these with your car it's not going to be pretty.

Tuli Block: Part II

On our last full day, we decided to take it easy, and only go on some short game drives. Of course once we got on the road, I just kept going until we ended up being in the car most of the day again. We did travel at a leisurely pace, and spent time enjoying the scenery and watching the wildlife. We saw zebra, kudu, warthogs, lots of impala, and even a group of giraffe's. We passed a huge ostrich farm, with thousands of ostriches. We did not see any elephants though, and that was one of our main reasons for going to this area. Oh well, we will get our chance eventually.

We took our time packing up in the morning, and got on the road about 9am. It was a hot day, but it seemed unusually hot in the car. We had the A/C on full blast, but it didn't seem to be cooling us off at all.

About half way home a bad smell was coming from the back of the vehicle, and I thought it was a leaky butane container that we used with our lantern. I threw it out, but the smell continued . When we got home we realized that the smell was coming from the melted carpeting of the vehicle. Because the tail pipe fell off, the heat from the engine was concentrated directly over the cargo bay, were the camping gear was stored. It was hot enough that it melted the carpet and a blue tarp I had laid down to set the dirty camping gear on. Thankfully everything else was fine.

Now to get the tailpipe fixed, and start planning the next camping trip.

Tuli Block: part I

We spent 3 nights camping in an area in eastern Botswana called the Tuli Block. It consists of a series of private game reserves on the edge of the Limpopo river. It's about a 6 hour drive from home on some very good roads. The roads were paved all the way to within the last 30 kms. We stayed at a very well kept camp site run by the Limpopo River Lodge, right on the banks of the river. In this area the river acts as a border between South Africa and Botswana, so as we sat at our campsite and looked across the river we were looking at South Africa.

We arrived on Tuesday afternoon and set up camp and relaxed after a long drive. As night falls all of the animals come out, and the sounds of living creatures splashing about in the water can be a little creepy. Hippo's and crocodiles live in the Limpopo, but I didn't see any. Cassandra swears we one of the creatures lurking about in the dark was a hippo, but I am sceptical.

Wednesday turned out to be a bit frustrating. We realized we were going need more fuel if we were going to be doing much in the way of game drives. The closest gas station on the Botswana side of the river was about 90 kms away. There was a station closer (about 40 kms away on the South African side), but we would have to go through immigration paper work and things at the border station if we went that way, so we decided to go to the farther station. After driving for about an hour and a half we finally made it to the town with the gas station only to be told they were out of fuel. The next closest station was another 60kms away. We had about a third of a tank left, so I decided we would cross the South African border and get gas since we knew that there was more than one station in that town and when we filled up we would only be 40 kms away from camp instead of 150kms. We drove back crossed the river, went through the border check point (thank goodness Cassandra had all our paperwork), and made it to the gas station just as the fuel light came on. We had spent almost 6 hours of our day driving around dealing with this. The moral of this story is to always carry a supply of fuel with you when traveling outside the city. You can guarantee that I will from now on.

On a side note; when we got back to camp I realized that all the rough road driving had jarred the tail pipe loose from the muffler, the ramifications of which we would not see until the drive back home.