Alright, so I got back from my eleven day trip through Botswana and Zimbabwe Sunday night, and I have so much to tell. Definitely going to be breaking it up into a couple of entries.
At 4:15am on March 21st, I was picked up along with the other students and taken to the airport. We flew to Johannesburg (saw a nice sunrise from the plane!) where we were divided into two groups. Hannah was my group leader; she works for 2WayTravel and was actually a study abroad student herself three years ago! Although the trip is organized through 2Way, the trucks that we used are from Nomad, a big African travel agency. Our truck’s name was Buddy (all the trucks are named after famous musicians, I believe). Philani was our cook, and Peter was our driver. The trucks were actually pretty nice. Plenty of seats, a little table towards the front to play cards on, a working sound system for iPods, and lockers for all our stuff. We piled in and started our long ride to a campsite outside of Palapye, Botswana, driving from about 10am until 7:30pm with a few stops in between.
I shared a tent with a girl named Rebecca, and the tents were so much easier to set up than I thought! When we go camping at home, our tent always seems so complicated. For this, you just laid the tent out, set up the poles, and hooked up the tent. The campsite was fine, toilets, showers, the basics. That night, the campsite provided food for us, and there was a nice bar, so everyone was excited about that. I was exhausted but stayed up a bit to get to know everyone; basically, I had signed up for a trip knowing no one on it while everyone else knew each other. I’m just going to list the people on the trip with me so I don’t have to keep reintroducing them 🙂 : Rebecca, Billy, Chris, Malorie, Laura, Maggie, Kathryn, Caroline, Evan, Mitch W, Mitch S, Corey C, Corey F, Adam, Matt, Lavasjah, Jamie, Hannah.
Anywho, that night while we were eating, the sweetest little kitty came over to our table. I of course went crazy, baby talking it and feeding it some nice chicken. She even took it from my hands! She was all black with a little patch of white on her chest and green eyes. I sat her between Hannah and me for a little while. Nice way to start off the trip!
The next day we got up early again to head to Sitatunga Camp in Maun, which was another six hours away. On average, I would say we woke up everyday at around 5 or 5:30am, and most of the drives took at least five hours, with only a couple being two or three hours. The campsite was about the same, not as nice of a bar area, but it had a pool so we all took advantage of that! It was Maggie’s birthday starting that night, so she got a nice bottle of champagne, and we hung out at the bar for a while. I tried a springbokkie shot, which was a little bitter at first but then actually pretty good; it’s made with crème de menthe and Amarula. After a while, some of us made our way to the campfire by our tents, where Adam pulled out his guitar and played for us. He’s a really great musician and played a song of his own plus a bunch that we could sing along too, like The General by Dispatch and Send Me On My Way by Rusted Root. I went to bed a bit earlier than everyone that night; I was exhausted and a little anxious about the next day because we would be going into the Okavango Delta and staying for two days!
Anecdotes:
- Cape Town seems to be very diligent about car safety and drinking. I saw a sign that said, “If you drink and drive, you’re a murderer.” Don’t think you’d see that in the states!
- No one in Cape Town or South Africa seems to know how to make a Kahlua and cream, but somehow, everyone in Botswana knows exactly what it is.
- Philani, our cook, is from Zimbabwe (aka Zim), and Peter, our driver, is from Kenya. Both really nice guys.
- Through much of our driving in Botswana, there were no rest stops, which meant using the bush as a bathroom; I was a successful first-timer!
- I received twenty mosquito bites on this trip.
Journey to Suid-Afrika 