Day 12 we crossed the border to Botswana for a river cruise and a game drive in the Chobe National Park.
It was a perfect day.
This is African's version of the bald eagle.
I had to take a picture of this Italian man and his wife who is not quite in the picture is dressed in a matching get-up. I pretended to take a picture of the water, but really just wanted to get a picture of him in all his safari glory.
Crocodile, with his mouth open to cool off.
Male hippo.
Pod 'o female hippos.
This elephant swam across the river and was just hanging out in the grass eating.
Here were the rest of that elephants friends. Botswana is known for it's huge elephant population, and it did not disappoint.
Our guide told us that this baby elephant was likely no more than 6 weeks old and had an obvious shoulder malformation. Made me sad to learn that it would likely be an easy kill for another animal. It hobbled quite well while trying to not put any weight on that leg.
Another young elephant playing around and throwing up sand.
Going back to the dock and the lodge for lunch.
After lunch we were ready to the game drive.
This would be one of our last game drives before we headed home and up until this point, we had seen 3 out of the "Big 5" (elephant, rhino, leopard) but had yet to see a lion in the wild or a water buffalo. We passed the gates from the national park and at the very first clearing, we saw this beauty:
Water buffalo...check!
All the guides called baboons, "BAD boons" because they caused nothin' but trouble; I, however, couldn't get over how cute the baby piggy back was.
Water Buck
Mongoose
Impala
Wouldn't it be fun to take an eyelash curler to those babies?
I asked these lovely elephants if they would smile for my camera and they kindly obeyed.
Just your everyday giraffe crossing the road
There was a fresh kill off to the side of the road and our driver drove in through the bush a little ways and spotted this lioness, napping in the shade. Lion...check! Got all the BIG FIVE! Woot woot!
Warthogs have to kneel on their front legs in order to eat off the ground, interesting tidbit of info and makes for a funny pic..
All in all, Botswana was quite impressive, but we definitely felt like tourists following the machine. It was nice to finally get through all the crazy border crossing stuff and have Richard waiting there to pick us up. On our short drive back to Imbabala Lodge, he took the long way to see if we could see any wildlife down by the river.
Seeing these animals just never got old (other than the impala). This elephant was just enjoying a drink by the river until it saw us.
And it bolted for the hills.
Our awesome guide Richard.
We got back dirty and exhausted, but he wanted to take us out for a night drive with a spotlight after dinner...how could we say no to such an adventure for our last night?
I took this one pic of a hippo blocking our road, then quickly realized that my camera wasn't going to do much out there in the total dark. We didn't really get to see anything "big" out on our night drive, but it was a neat experience any way.
We got back to our little bungalow and crashed knowing that we had a really long day of travel ahead of us.
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