Out of Africa-Part One

We have returned from our wonderful African safari and I am looking forward to posting some of the great memories and photos of the trip. We did our own airfare and boy, were we thankful we did. We took a straight Delta flight from Atlanta straight through to Johannesburg, stopping in Dakar but not even having to deplane. It was a long flight but much better than two overnight flights. We arrived and got the shuttle to our hotel which was very close to the airport. The next day we had arranged a daytrip to Pretoria and to the diamond mines. It was a pretty day and it was just us and our guide in his car. Pretoria is a lovely city and the jacaranda trees were in bloom and everything was just beautiful. The next morning, our tour really started. The ten of us in our group were taken to the airport in Johannesburg and we flew to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe where we met our Tour Guide Ntando. We weighed all our duffel bags and got on our small bus and headed to our first camp-Baobob #2. We had to go through Zimbabwe passport control and then through Botswana passport control and we saw our first animals on the drive to camp-a very large family of elephants crossed the road right in front of us. We also saw a stork, and a heard of Zebra. Wow, we really were in Africa!! At Baobob, we were greeted with song and a nice fruit drink. Our tent looked over a small water hole and animals came to drink all during the day. It was just beautiful to go out on our deck and look down at the waterhole and see warthogs with their babies and cape buffaloes and impala and and and.... There were baboons everywhere! They were contstantly squawking at each other, sitting in the tops of the trees and going up and won the trees. There were many new babies and we loved watching them. One morning, a big papa baboon came into the open air lodge and stole a cushion off one of the chairs. He took it and gave it to his baby to lie on. How sweet that was, except the staff was not very happy about it! So a couple of the guides went running after him and threw rocks up at the baboons and the baby dropped the cushion and it was recovered. Some waterbucks came to drink from the waterhole later in the afternoon. The tent here at Baobob was quite nice. It was hot and difficult to get cooled off even though it had a ceiling fan above us. When we turned on the lights at night, it was hard to write in my journal or read because the small bugs came around. But everything was very handy and certainly not what we'd expect in a tent! When we turned off the lights, the night sounds were just amazing. We tried to imagine what the sounds were we were hearing. As the trip went along, we began to learn the sounds and know more what was wandering around near us. The camp rule is that you are escorted by a staff member to your cabin at night and you don't come out until morning. After the first night, we were not tempted to disobey the rules! The first night, we heard what was confirmed the next morning as a lion and an elephant!