Safari Day 13 - Nike gone walkabout

Highlight of the day: Hundreds of elephants in Chobe National Park.

Last night when we got back to camp, we discovered that our running shoes had gone missing. We had left them out to dry, as they were still drenched from the falls, and locked them up in the tent before going out for dinner. They weren't there when we got back. So we spent our last day in Victoria Falls filling out a police report and taking an officer to the 'scene of the crime.' We were not too surprised that the theives took only our shoes, since guys on the street had been offering to buy them since our arrival two days ago. I guess they are in high demand. And who could resist Nigel's bright orange and shiny silver ones? We were thankful that we'll be in London in a week or so where we can replace them. As we were giving the details to the man, he filled out the proper forms. I happened to glance over at the woman standing next to me, speaking to another officer. I looked at the form the officer was filling out, and under 'Type of Crime' she had written 'Rape.' But they were just speaking out in the open, and the victim appeared as if it has happened to her before. I felt awful wasting their time with our stolen shoes worth about $500 when serious, tragic crimes happen every day.

We made it back to camp in time to say goodbye to the people in our group, as everyone was going off on different safari routes from here. We left around 9:30 a.m. with our new, very small group. Joining the two of us, Toni, Jairos and Benson, we had Misha and Sophie, a couple (both doctors) from Holland & Belgium, respectively (on their honeymoon), Marilyn from Canada, Bearnt from Germany, and Neil from England. It was a very different group, since we were joined by another married couple, a young guy by himself (Neil), and two older people (Marilyn and Bearndt). We drove to the Botswana border, got our visas, and continued on to Kasane. After setting up camp, we headed off for an afternoon/evening game drive through Chobe National Park.

Chobe is Botswana's second largest game park and has one of the highest concentrations of animals in all of Africa. It is also home to one of the highest concentrations of elephants in the world. They are the largest elephants of of all. During the safari, we saw, in addition to hundreds of elephants: mongooses, lots of 'deer things,' fishing eagles, lots of guinea fowls, giraffes, crocodiles, hippos, dung beetles, a spoonbill, egrets, and a pride of lions-1 male, 3 females and 5 cubs. Chobe is absolutely beautiful. It was so fun watching the herds of elephants in their different activities: bathing in the mud, washing in the water holes, eating from the trees, and scratching up against tree trunks. We saw plenty of tiny elephants too, their trunks flopping around uncontrolled. One baby was cut off from part of his herd when our jeep drove along the road. The baby trumpeted his hardest and loudest and ran across the road in front of us, trying to catch up with mum. We also saw one baby completely tip over onto his head because he was so unbalanced tyring to lay down in the mud.

We were able to stay inside the park to watch the sunset, a beautiful sight. We were lucky to see the pride of lions on our way out, and stopped to watch the cubs playing, jumping on top of the male and one of the females. As we drove out of the park, the full moon rose before us, huge above the horizon and beautiful against the purple blue colours of the sky.