Ramblings from the bush & beyond
Ramblings from the bush & beyond
Back to Bots!
We’re going back to Botswana in February for 10 days! While not as long as our 2 1/2 week safari in 2007, we are really looking forward to not just being back in Bots but being back in the same season as our very first safari which kicked off this passion back in 2004. We will revisit the Okavango Delta, Selinda and Linyanti, but this will be our first time in the Kalahari.
A lot has changed in the 3+ years since our last Bots safari. When we last visited the Linyanti, the Savuti Channel was dry and parched. Indeed, it had been dry for nearly 30 years – Derek & Beverly Joubert’s Nat Geo film “The Stolen River” famously documented when the river mysteriously dried up in 1981; thousands of animals perished as a result of this dramatic shift in the ecosystem. Now, after nearly 3 decades of dormancy, the Savuti River is once again alive and the vegetation and animal life are thriving. The river stretches over 100km. It originates in the Zibadianja Lagoon, passes through the Magwikhwe Sand Ridge and has reached the Savute Marsh in the Chobe National Park.
That said, we will be starting our safari in a desert! We will begin in a remote part of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which has some of the best summer wildlife game viewing in Africa (Feb will be summer in the southern hemisphere). It is the home of the legendary Kalahari black-maned lion and has some of the best cheetah viewing. But, the reserve is the largest conservation area in Bots and one of the largest in the world (5 million hectares or 12 million acres) so the lions and cheetahs will have plenty of space to hide from us!
We will next travel north to the Okavango Delta. We will be staying at Chitabe (where we also stayed in 2007), which is located in a 28,000 hectare photographic reserve. We had excellent leopard and elephant sightings in 2007, but we are keeping our fingers crossed for wild dog: the Botswana Wild Dog Research Project takes place in that general area.
Our final stop of the safari will be the 135,000 hectare Selinda Reserve, which borders the Okavango Delta and the Linyanti, We will be staying at Selinda Camp, which is on the banks of the eastern Selinda Spillway, the waterway that links the Okavango Delta with the Linyanti and Kwando marshes, rivers and floodplain. The water can flow in both directions, depending on where the water level is higher. There is a resident pack of wild dogs in the area, but we are looking forward to some great general game viewing, as well as sitting on the terrace of the camp and watching the animals come and go along the spillway!
We will end our trip with a week in the wine lands outside Cape Town, which we last visited back in 2005 after our Zim-Zam canoe and walking safari.
As always, we approach this safari with a mixture of confidence that we have done our home work and the uncertainty of simply not being to predict what nature will offer us! We are readying our gear and clearing our calendar but ultimately we will have to go back to Africa with an open mind and simply discover what lies in store!
Saturday, October 16, 2010