Another rubbish sleep with stupid dreams! Grrr and I was in a proper bed, what's going on?! Anyways we were leaving Livingstone, Zambia today :( with our new group. It was surprisingly a 8am departure more of a civilised time for once.
We had an hours drive to the Zambia/Botswana border crossing. Now here's where things were proper African Style, organised caos! Sometimes it can take 40mins to get through this border or apparently up to 12hours. There was a 'so called' ferry to take the truck and us across the Zambezi River to get to Botswana. This ferry was basically a platform with two engines at either side, typical it's illegal to take photos at a border crossing or I would have taken heaps so you could actually believe me. We were classified as live cargo so our truck gets right of way but some lorries sit for 3 weeks waiting to get across. Zambia exports a lot of copper internationally via South Africa therefore it was mostly artics full of copper! It looked very unsafe though and we could easily just walk off the front or back, health and safety definatly hasn't reached this area yet!! It only took us an hour to get from one country to another which was excellent and much better than we expected. We had to walk over disinfectant mats for foot and mouth with all our footwear we had!! That brought back the memories.
Our campsite tonight was right on the Chobe River bank and we arrived there in time to make lunch! Phoebe and I are now sharing a tent all the way to Cape Town, we get on really well and seem to be ace tent buddies :) but due to the rain in Livingstone last night, the tent we picked had been used by someone else and was absolutely soaking wet outside and inside, with mud everywhere. Yuck! There was noway we were putting our bags in there, so we went on a mission and found a bucket, cloth and cleaning stuff that belonged to the camp and scrubbed it from top to bottom. Sounds fine but remember its about 30 odd degrees here, so it was a pretty hot and sticky job!
After lunch we went on a Safari on the Chobe River, on a double decker boat. We had our cool box stacked full of wine, beers and ciders, which we took with us, so it was good fun having a drink or two watching hippos all around you. We seen crocs, buffalos, impalas, eagles but mainly hippos!! There were loads of them, they are such a size and very dangerous. They were in the river, on the river banks, walking about, eating - basically everywhere.
This was the first time we got to speak to some of the 'newbies' on the group but so far the group is nothing like our old one :( It's taking a while to get to know everyone. It was a 3 hour River Safari, which I really enjoyed and it was chilly on the boat which was lovely to feel cold again!!
We were having beef stir fry with rice, for tea, round the campfire when a security guard came and delivered a note! It was for Phoebe, Nicole, Sam, Clare, Randa and me from the old group who were at the same campsite the previous night! It was so nice and they had also left notes in the sand for us too.
It's 9.30pm and I'm in my tent already, which is all nice and clean now :) Ciders since lunch time takes its toll!!!
Goodnight Botswana!!!! xxx