Rosemary and I set off from London Heathrow on a Friday evening,  19.05 British Airways A380 to Johannesburg, for our Botswana safari with the tour company Naturetrek.  Enjoyed the inflight entertainment, watched Hunger Games and Mission Impossible.  Rosemary viewed the new Man from Uncle, giving it the thumbs down. We arrived early on Saturday 7.00am and transferred to an Air Botswana propeller plane.  Unfortunately BA would not check us through, so we had to immigrate and emigrate into South Africa with a delay at passport control almost comparable to  Miami .

African Wild Dogs

We were on our way with inflight refreshments of chilli biltong and beer.  We arrived in Maun, with yet more queues and passport stamping.  The whole group of travellers had now discovered each other as we loaded up onto two open-sided Toyota Land Cruisers converted to game watching vehicles.  Our two guides, Shaka and Shadreck handed out water in metal bottles.   We set off on metalled roads for 30 miles, then onto dirt roads as we headed to the Khwai Community area.  On the way we saw various birds and animals.  The highlight of the animals were the pack of six African Wild dogs.  Three dogs lay in the road, in the bush next to them were another three dogs, and the possibility that there was a female holed up in the den with some pups.

Camp

Further on we had our first sighting of Kudu, Elephant and Zebra, and our first beautiful African sunset.  We eventually reached our campsite and were shown to our huge tents, with outdoor bathroom of a loo seat over a hole in the ground, and a bucket shower.  We were warned to keep the tent closed, against insects and the monkeys who would nick anything. Our tent was a little way from the others and hidden from them.  Refreshed we turned up for supper of chicken stew, broccoli, rice and squash.  The afters was Banana, Nutella and Amarula.