Bombing along in Botswana
Land of enormous elephants and bulbous Baobabs
16.07.2009
25 °C
Crossing the border into Botswana was an interesting affair. After negotiating the 30km of sandy track we were the 4th people at the border post which was a good thing as it took the border guy at least 40 mins to process us!
The Limpopo river forms the border between the 2 countries and we were suprised to find no bridge over it!
Luckily it hasn't rained for a month so shoes came off and we headed across - keeping a close look out for cros and potholes... Unfortunatley Rob saw a deep pothole too late, fell off the bike and almost lost the contents of his bar box!! Lucky our bags are waterproof!
On the Botswana side there was immediately evidence of elephants close by. We had been told that Botswana has a serious elephant problem with 130,000 too many. A huge cull had been organised but the "greenies" have paid the government E25 000 000 Euros not to shoot them. The eles are running riot and Botswana is rapidly turning from savannah to dessert.
We found our way to the campsite and it looked as if there had been a war in it - broken trees everywhere and very fresh ele prints..... then we saw them.
and made a hasty retreat!
We were shown to an alternative campsite (the active one) which did look elephant free and Rob was given a fishing rod to try and catch dinner.... so all was well.
However as soon as darkness came so did the elephants!
We had a very restless night stoking the camp fire every 2 hrs and listening to trumpeting elephants breaking trees on three sides of the tent!
Polly very happy by our precious fire after having survived the night!
The rest of Botswana has been flat flat flat, hot in the day and cold at night. Villages are scarce and campsites even scarcer.
Magnificent Baobabs break the monotony of the long straight roads.
Next stop is Vic Falls but to get there we have to traverse 300km of bad road with abundant elephants, occasional lion and no campsites...... watch our blog in about 5 days to see how it went....!
Posted by robandpol 05:17 Archived in Botswana Tagged bicycle
No fair! I never saw any elephants when I was there despite waking up especially to look out of the window at 3am as the bus was passing through a particularly elephanty bit of road up towards kazungula ferry crossing. I can confirm it's also a particularly potholey bit of road too but bikes should hopefully be a bit more manouvreable than the big coach I was on.
Can confirm - plenty of elephants!
16.07.2009 by martha