Chobe National Park

We go to Chobe National Park in Botswana for a safari. It's about an hour mini-bus ride, then crossing a ferry where Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia meet on the Chobe River. On the ride there we meet one group of people who are with an adventure-volunteer group. They arrange trips from 6 weeks to 6 months for people to help out at schools, orphanages and small villages. They also arrange certain outings like this safari for them. You have to pay for everything, but you get a much different experience than if you stayed in a hotel the whole time.

One of the people in the group is a woman that works customs interdiction in England. Not at the border or the airport; She works with a group that tries to stop smuggling rings. Drugs, diamonds? Drugs, Yes, and human smuggling. There isn't much diamond smuggling. Oh, and tax smuggling, people bringing in cigarettes or alcohol without paying the VAT tax, or taking cigs or alcohol for export and redirecting it back into the country.

Chris says "Welcome to the safest country in Africa: Botswana". It has high HIV, but it's also one of the wealthier countries, market oriented although largely rural, good public health services funded by a fair amount of diamond wealth. Botswana is peaceful: Peace from strife, and also peace in person, of the people we meet there.

As we go through the Botswana immigration station I overhear one person jokingly say to another "I'll kill you, man, trust me, I will". He says it in a joking way, and I'm pretty sure he is joking, but it's the type of joke that people make here in Africa.

They drive us around in a bush jeep looking for animals. We don't find that many: a few giraffes, a herd of 20 or 30 zebras, some different gazelles and kudu. Wild pigs like in "The Lion King", hyenas, eagles of different kinds. After the jeep tour, we go on a pontoon boat down the river. Hippos, several groupings of 30 each. Unlike at DisneyWorld, they don't charge the boat, although they do say they are dangerous. Crocodiles. Two elephants swimming across the river. I take a lot of pictures. Chris says I'm "shutter happy".

Going back we drive through herd of cattle crossing the road.

That final evening in Livingstone, I walk out to "Pub & Grill" twice, with two different groups, at night, in the dark. It's a bar in Livingstone that is only about two blocks away from the youth hostel, and there is some lighting along the way. A band there is doing great covers of The Rolling Stones and James Brown. Afterwards a group of us sit & talk in the pillow pit. The previous night while sitting here I had magically produced avocado that I had bought in the market earlier. Some of the Norwegians had never tasted avocado before, so it was a fun treat, and helped sooth their drunken stomachs.