SA-Botswana – day 10

Our last day… meeting point was 6 AM at the gate for the game drive. At 10 ° Celsius. That was COLD! 😉 But Zizi, our guide, gave us poncho-blankets. They helped a lot. Marakele National Park is divided into two parts: in one of them you can walk around, in the other one there are the more dangerous animals and you can’t leave the car. At least not without the guide taking out First thing Zizi found was an owl. Luckily it was not disturbed by the light and we could take pics. a riffle. In the ‚harmless part‘ they set up the campsites but if you would like to go for a hike you still have to book guided tours. We drove over to the ‚dangerous‘ part. For that we had to go through several gates that were all locked. It was like 2 hours driving around being cold and not seeing anything but trees, bushes and a sunrise. 😉 What we saw was a poertable toilet. When we asked Zizi about it she told us that recently there had been a marathon in the Park. They must have run record times when an elephant came out of the bush while they were running… 😀 to be honest: I can’t really understand how they can do something like that in a park with dangerous, wild animals. But I don’t have to understand everything. 🙂 Finally we saw a rhino on the path. Then a second one came out of the bush. A third. A fourth… and they all started running away immediately. They were much shyer than the ones we had seen in Kruger. After that we had an old male elephant who was calm. But Zizi turned the car around because she said that the grumpy old elephants who don’t find women who want to mate with him are the ones who tend to attack cars. So we preferred to go back the way we had come. Experiencing how it is when a grumpy elephant tries to mate with your car might have been an interesting experience though. 😀

At lunch time we went back to Thambazimbi and there it was the place where I got my only moscito bite. I know that because the lady sitting opposite me saw the moscito and told me. But it was already too late. The restaurant called ‚Koolstuff‘ was good and had interesting food. One of the group ate a pork knuckle. I had my cheap filet steak. Everything was good. The only issue about this restaurant is that it is next to a car repair shop. And that means some bad smells and lots of noise. But food was good. Then supermarket again and back to the camp. In the evening we went out again with Zizi. And the decision was not to go look for animals but go to a viewpoint at over 2000 meters. So we went up to Lenong View Point. Once we arrived at the top we got out of the car and had to take a short walk down to a bench. It was a rocky area but I thought I would be able to handle that well enough. But after a few steps I realized that I shouldn’t walk down there without help. I would have fallen because of loosing my balance. So I thank the group again that the helped me to go down and later they helped me again when we got back to the car. My equilibrium is much worse than I had realized and there was nothing that I could hold on to. But asking for help is not a bad thing. 🙂 Anyway, we saw a wonderful sunset from up there. It was a nice end to our trip on our last evening. When the sun had disappeared we went down again, had dinner. And then our mentor heroically removed the common baboon spider from my bathroom that had terrified me the night before. The pic might give you an impression of it. But it was really too big for me.