track our trek

at the border to botswana we saw our first baobab trees...there are scores of these huge ancient trees along the ngoma border post...what a sight! we camped for a night in chobe and went for a sunset cruise...what an amazing experience! we saw a huge family of elephants drinking together from the river. and we got our first look at an enormous family of hippos...they live in families of up to fifty, and i'm sure there were at least fifty in this one! after all the stories we'd heard about how dangerous they are (hippos are reponsible for more deaths in africa than an other wild animal!) it was wild to be on a boat so close to them! they are notoriously territorial and their jaws are powerful enough to snap a mokoro in half! (a mokoro is a conoe-like boat hollowed out of a tree.) we were on a boat a bit more substantial than that, but it still gave us chills thinking about it. wow! they are such peculiar animals...they have no sweat glands, so they must live in water to stay cool. they come to land at night to graze, but they will attack anyone unfortunate enough to get between them and the water, or too close to their young...and as huge as they are, those suckers can run! yikes...you can imagine how unsettling it was to hear them walking around between our tents that night! there had been so much rain, that the bar was nearly flooded, the swimming pool was under 15cm of river water, and that made our campground perfect night-grazing ground for the hippos!! thankfully i sleep like the dead, so i was spared the experience of lying awake listening to them grunting and shuffling around. but daryll was awake on watch. and i did hear susie and brett bravely venture to the bathroom in the middle of the night...i'm afraid i'd have had to hold it til morning!!