Okavango, Village and Scenic Flight

Being poled through the delta.

Papillion and his great smile.

The whole group and our local hosts.

 Life in the local village.

 Roof repairs.

Papillion returning home.

 I was in the front seat for the flight and sauna.

 Wading elephants.

 Cape buffalo.

 The flooded delta.

Coming in for a landing... it's amazing how hard it is to see out the front of the plane over the dash!

Wednesday, October 11^th.

We packed up our camp at dawn, had a quick breakfast, loaded everything into the mokoros for the return trip to Maun. We had another two hour pole through the canals and past the hippo pool, but this time we could here them but didn't see them.

When we got to the disembarking location the locals got all the stuff out of the mokoros and onto the truck and then we had a couple of group photos taken. We drove a couple of kilometres to the local village where a couple of our guides were proud to show us around their town. I watched a man re-thatch his house and some of the kids running around town. This is a very remote place to live. None of them have cars, there is no electricity, satellite dishes or running water. They have to walk to a communal tank to get water and there is a communal outhouse. Some of the people are Bushmen and other come from other tribes including the Harrera whose women wear hats with simulated horns because they are cattle people.

Then we continued our drive back to the Riverside Hotel and set up camp. After that I took my laptop to the bird porch and sat and typed up the last couple of days and backed up and selected photos for the blog. Then I uploaded them. When I closed the computer the broken hinge corner caught and shattered the screen. A few shards of glass came off and I was really afraid it might not start up again.

This afternoon 14 of us had decided to take the scenic flight over the Okavango Delta. I am not really sure why I decided to do it, because last time I was here I was disappointed with how little wildlife we saw and frankly you are better seeing things on the ground than the air. Plus, it just didn't look as wet and flooded as National Geographic shows. However, this time we saw a lot more animals, hundreds of elephants, dozens of hippos, lots of unidentifiable antelope, giraffe, a couple of fly fish eagles, and hundreds of cape buffalo. It is hard to get great shots from up there, but they do give an idea of the area. Again it seemed dry, so I asked the pilot and he told me that it is just beginning to drain and it doesn't get much wetter than this. The water here comes from the rainy season in Angola and runs south through the plains and eventually disappears in to the Kalahari Desert. So the flight was much more interesting this time, although it was like a sauna in the plane.

After the flight four of us took a taxi back (because the rest were taking a flight after us) and as soon as I got back I changed and jumped in the pool to lower my body temperature. Felt great.

Then I got the computer out and gingerly turned it on... so far so good... the screen is broken in the bottom corner but it still works. We'll see how it goes.

Then we gathered for a buffet dinner at the hotel restaurant, had a team meeting about tomorrow's itinerary and headed off to bed.