Charging Elephants, de ly-ons and 4 bee 4’s

From CKGR we drove to Maun were we literally rolled into Caltex on the dregs of our fuel tank. Maun is a funky town where old meets new, tourists mingle with the hawkers from the markets and Campbell negotiated his first successful bargain. It went as follows:

Campbell approaches a drinks stand on this 40degree hot day, opens our ASDA portable braai, points at the display of drinks and says, in very broken English, "Two cokes, one braai". At which point the lady's eyebrows disappear into her hairline and she replies in perfect English "Ah, no!". Feeling dejected and a bit silly, my pooks was about to pack up his offer when a keen Indian at the next door stand took the braai and shoved two cold cokes into Campbell's hands. Score!

Next stop, Moremi Nature Reserve in the Okavango Delta where we went on a very scary but totally awesome game drive and saw hippo, elephant, giraffe, zebra, warthogs, a massive lizard and of course lots of buck (buck are everywhere).

I say scary because we were mock charged by two elephants and Campbell risked a lot to climb on top of the landy to get a better viewpoint of a family of hippo, before realising that there was another much larger hippo not far away. I don't think you can call it a mock charge but the hippo definately thought we were up to no good and left it's watery and I'm sure quite cosy spot in the delta to shoo us away. We didn't get any pictures of the hippo out of the water because we were desparately trying to get Thomo off the roof of the landy and into the car so we could leg it!

Then as we were being chased back to our camp by an ominous storm on roads that put our 4x4 skills to the test, we came upon a particuarly bad ditch. As we are still amatures in the world of 4x4'ing we stopped to discuss our approach when a herd of elephants jumped out from behind the dense bush 4metres to the right of us. The female mock charged us to make sure we weren't a threat to her family and when she'd had her say one of her young males clearly thought mom was losing her touch, so he mock charged us again. Wow, did we p**p ourselves. See the panic in her eyes below...ahhh!!!!!

Stressed elephant >>>

Chilled out elephant >>>

Once again we heard lion but did not see them. A cheeky hyena also scared the begeeeezers out of me. Campbell had gone to shower and having read about how to pack all your food items away when camping in a game park with hyena, I turned off off the lights except a small torch so I could appreciate the fireflies and stars. After about 30seconds I realised how stupid I was being and thought I better pan the area with my torch. One pan to the right, one pan to the left ...HYENA 2metres away from me. Ahhhhhhhh!!! Thinking it was a lioness on the hunt, I forgot everything I'd read and bolted to the tent. I had two seconds to regroup when I thought I heard Campbell coming back from the bathrooms, well I couldn't let him get eaten while I was hiding out in the tent. So I stuck my head out to find a hyena happily licking our braai pit. So, taking a page out of the elephants book, I mock charged it and ran to the car to turn on all the lights. It worked, the hyena bolted. I am mock charging machine and I saved Campbell's bacon...well if it had been a lion I would have!

Apart from 4x4'ing through white sand, massive ditches and black mud, Moremi also threw us a few really dodgy bridges which literally sounded like the bridge was breaking underneath us. We are a great team.

We also discovered several baby bees in our landy. They haven't surfaced since so we hope they flew into the landy rather than originated there. 4 bee 4 experience and half.