Hello Mexico

We are now in Mexico, on the seven mile white sand beach near the tiny village of Barra de Potosi just south of Zihuatanejo. When we went to Africa we flew via Los Angeles so we could leave the inflatable kayak at the hotel to be picked up on our return. Today Bill blew it up and made his way out through the pounding surf. I've taken a couple of photos of him and of the palapa and view in front of where we are staying, a place called Our House Bed and Breakfast. The last photo is of the neighbor's house and pool where I am going to lounge this afternoon. Sigh

Farewell to Africa

On Feb. 4 we flew out of Livingstone to Johannesburg and then on to Washington DC and finally to LA. The trip involved 23 hours of flight time and 9 hours of airport waiting. For our last African blog we wanted to include a few of the animal photos that we took on our Chobe safari with Toff. For those of you who would like to do a trip such as ours you can reach Toff and Kiddy, pictured above, at www.toffandkiddybotswana.blogspot.com That should also lead to the website of their company Ultimate Africa Botswana. We highly recommend them to anyone wishing to experience the best of animal viewing.

Bush Picnic

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On Sunday, Feb 1, neighbors Franz and Mandy and their friend Gary took Toff and us to a lovely pan not far from their lodge where we had a bush picnic. Gary prepared the food that was cooked on the open fire:mild red chilis with cheese, cabbage with garlic and cheese, and an enormous squash (they called it a pumpkin) stuffed with chicken and mushrooms.

Visiting Pandamatenga

On Saturday Jan. 31, we drove to Pandamatenga. A few miles out of Kasane on the main paved highway we were forced to stop because of giraffes on the road. This is always exciting to me, running into exotic animals leisurely crossing our route. These were two large adults and while we were stopped for them we noticed two more adults, a teenager and two new babies in the bushes beside the road. Of course the camera was in the trunk. A short while before the giraffes we had passed elephants on both sides of the highway. At Panda we stayed at Touch of Africa, the lodge of our neighbors Franz and Mandy. We spent part of the afternoon walking to our building site and pointing out the giraffe and zebra tracks. Toff had marked out the site and we measured and discussed and came up with the correct size for the building pad and the location of main supports for the thatched roof. All of the above photos were taken on or near the property. The top one is the border road between Botswana on the right and Zimbabwe on the left. It is nearly 100 kilometers to any road or settlement on the Zimbabwe side. The second photo is a millipede, one of many on the road. The third photo is a road along the farm fence that leads to the boundry road. The left is open animal corridor and the right is farm land. The last two photos are of our building site, the last from the back of where the house will be showing the view to where we will have a water hole and the first looking away from the back of the house.

Sundowners on the Chobe

A safari tradition that we have come to enjoy is the sundowner. This involves finding a beautiful spot frequently with some game to view and sitting and enjoying a cool drink, usually a gin and tonic, while the famous orange ball that is an African sunset slowly fires the landscape. Since we were in the town of Kasane, Toff and his little Jack Russell took us out on his boat to a spot on the Chobe where the Zambezi backs up and makes ripples and there we sipped and listened to the hippos.

Village Visitors

Kasane is a town of about 15,000. It and Maun are the two biggest tour centers of Botswana. Still it has a small town feeling. Bill saw two wart hogs at the shopping center a few days ago and I heard a hyena outside the window last night. Today our visitors were male and female boomslang snakes in the trees above the house. The book says that they rarely bite but their venom can kill you in 1 to 3 days due to internal bleeding. Toff called in Mike Clemence local chief mechanic and snake catcher. Mike and his crew caught both snakes and put them in pillow cases provided by Toff. They measured 1.7 and 1.79 meters (5ft 8 inches and 6ft), a record for this area.

Can you have too many elephants?

The day after my birthday Toff drove us to a large grassy area near a section of the Chobe river where two elephants were taking a mud bath, rolling in it, throwing it onto their backs, going into the mud headfirst and butt up, lying on their sides and just swishing a trunk. It made for amazing fun photos. As we watched we became aware that there were other elephants about, lots of other elephants, more than a hundred other elephants. Slowly they passed by us moving on big grey legs without a sound just surrounding us and moving on. There were tiny babies that didn't reach to their mother's bellys and that could walk along right under their moms, there were youngsters running and playing with their tails in the air like wart hogs, there was one enormous male with the biggest tusks I've ever seen. He came in beside a big matriarch but his size made her look small. At one time we had over 125 elephants on all sides of us with more coming on. We had only two incidents that were a bit scary. One of the last families to pass had a matriarch with a floppy ear and a really bad temper. She was not happy with our being there and she hurried her little group in and back out and did not cross over to the grass on the other side as most had done. On the way back she came right at us and made threatening noises and postures. Then she moved her group off but one of her young males, maybe six or seven years old decided to posture to us and that made her think we had done something to him so back she came. We huddled silently in the open land cruiser, not a word, not a movement and finally she moved away behind us. The other incident came after we had driven away and then had to come back that way. Another female decided she was fed up with us being there and gone and then back again so she just plain charged us:ears out, trunk up trumpeting her anger and running. Fortunately we had passed her and were driving away so we were able to step on the gas and leave her. But she surely would have bashed the truck. A conservative guess would be that we have over 200 elephant photos. I'll try to select a few.