Poo trivia and other things

Our next adventure saw us departing from Johannesburg on a 16 day camping trip. By day 12 we could finally pronounce our guide, Ncane’s name properly… it required clicking your tongue as though you were tisking somebody and then rolling the click into an N and then finishing off with “anay” A lot of the time he got referred to as “Eddie” for his Eddie Murphy smile. He didn’t mind as he had already given everyone else in the group nicknames… for some reason Adam was the Colonel and I was Miss Fergie. The first couple of days involved a lot of driving. In addition to vast expanses of pavement, we saw hundreds of termite mounds that were probably larger than most downtown Vancouver apartments, a few ostriches hanging out by the side of the road, and plenty of elephants. But the real excitement started on day three! We set out for our trip into the Okavango Delta, a 15,000 km2 stretch of wetlands most of which is inaccessible and rarely visited. We soon discovered how the locals traverse the delta when we were loaded into the traditional dugout canoes known as mokoros. These wobbly boats are pushed along through the shallow delta using a long pole, fortunately we had a skilled poler on board so we just got to sit back and enjoy the scenery. Unlike most of the campsites up to this point there were no barriers to keep the animals out it was just us in the wilderness. We were reminded of this one afternoon when we spotted an elephant grazing within 30 metres of our campsite. All of our wildlife viewing was done on foot, a little unnerving especially when we accidentally came a little too close to another elephant that was hidden by a bush one day. Fortunately we saw him before he saw us! We saw several more elephants, zebra, a python, small game, and several different birds. We encountered an incredible amount of elephant poo, which we discovered you don’t step in but trip over because each lump is at least the size of a football. Oh yes, a bit of poo trivia for you: we found some poo that was completely white…. any guesses which animal it was from?
We amused the polers one afternoon with our attempts to manoeuvre their mokoros- it is definitely harder than it looks! The grand finale was a flight over the delta where we saw even more wildlife, this time from a more comfortable distance.
Then it was time to hit the road again for more exciting adventures… stay tuned for the next instalment from the camping trip.