Back home now for a few weeks. Just done 7 loads of washing. Ironing is going to be hell.
The scenic flight over the Okavango Delta was fantastic. Although the place looks like a grassy savanna, it's not - most of the grass is actually reed beds sat in a metre of water. Even from the air we couldn't see many large animals. It's not like they could be hiding anywhere - there aren't large swathes of forest and as far as i'm aware elephants can't stand on tip-toes, so they couldn't have been behind the individual trees that dotted the otherwise low-level landscape. The scenery was great though and there were herds of wildebeest and the like. Broke my rule about never getting on a plane with a propeller though...
That evening the tour leader, Manny, announced he had a twisted testicle (sic.) and would be leaving the tour for an emergency operation. Ouch.
After Maun and the Okvanga Delta we had a long drive through Botswana. We were heading to Johannesburg, but it was a hell of a long way. The Kalahari desert isn't the featureless sand dunes of the Sahara, it's semi-arid which means sand and spiky bushes. But this is just as uninteresting to look at when it goes on and on and on... We drove for a day and the scenery never changed.
The trip notes stated that we'd stop and camp in the desert, sitting around a warm fire toasting marshmallows, etc, etc. However, Mike (the remaining tour leader) didn't want to arrive the next day in Johannesburg after dark (something about murder, rape and pillage), so we kept going until dusk, reaching the border town of Lobatse.
Despite driving around for about an hour to find a mythical camp site, we couldn't find it so headed back to a motel we'd past earlier. Mike was a little embarrassed about the fact we were going to have to pay for our accommodation but he went off to ask the rates. The motel only had 5 rooms, as only 3 of those had hot water. It wasn't the nicest hotel and the owner seemed strangely reluctant to let us stay. Still it was warm and he let us in eventually. In the morning we clicked that the owner was clearly more used to renting out the rooms by the hour, which explained the other "guests"; some drunk, most unfriendly and disproportionately male. The pipes also kept banging all night.
Next day we headed for Johannesburg and stayed in a very nice hotel (the only night worker there was the security guard) for our final night. We walked to a local steak restaurant that evening and each ate half a cow (except the veggies who chewed on a couple of forlorn carrots). Dan had a huge kebab dangling on a skewer (see pic). The local houses in Johannesburg clearly took security very serious given the height of the fences and the very unsubtle implied threats of violence to anyone who dares so much as ring on the doorbell.
Got a few weeks off now before Moscow. I've uploaded some of the best pics (http://picasaweb.google.com/richlwill0/20080728AfricaBest/photo#map or see website www.energiser.net).
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