Botswana trip – Camping in the heart of Moremi and Savuti

The camp fire
The camp fire

The seed for the trip to Botswana was planted when we were in the Serengeti plains of Tanzania in May. Amit Sharma, my good friend of many years said that there was a great price deal and photographer Vincent Grafhorst will be our host. I was instantly hooked. Six months was a long time but there were things which took long, like the Johannesburg visa, plans were changed which meant re-booking tickets several Times.

I hate flying long distances but a short stop at Dubai before flying to Johannesburg a night’s rest there and then the short flight to Maun made the long journey bearable, Since I was carrying all the camera equipment I owned it meant more than the allowed number of Kgs but the airlines did not give any problems, however the customs at Mumbai while going were a bit too inquisitive and took more than an hour…

Upon reaching Maun, we were met by Vincent our host and Chimney our driver and guide from Bushways. We drove to third bridge area of Moremi Reserve. The mood was set by a pair of mating Lions which we spotted just as we entered the reserve! We had quick lunch by a water hole. Bidari our cook was a magician and for the entire duration of 10 days managed to conjure tasty food and freshly baked bread all cooked on wood fire. We had chicken or lamb or fish and scrumptious desserts served every day

After some more driving we stopped in what seemed like middle of no where and someone said jokingly – this is the camp site! And damn! Chimney repeated it and said “This is the camp site” There was pin drop silence.

We recovered quickly and got down. Chimney briefly showed us how to pitch tents and soon we had all 4 tents setup. Chimney then gave safety instructions for the night which in itself were scary enough for one of us to decide to sleep in the Land Cruiser for the first night 😉 No! I won’t name him as the code dictates “what happens in jungle stays in the jungle”. Sure enough, Chimney was not exaggerating. During our stay, in the night, the camp was trespassed by elephants and hyenas, we could hear lions and hippos calling and the story was pretty much repeated in all the three camps. We stayed for 4 days in the Third bridge area, 3 days in the Khawai river area and 3 days in the Savuti region. We would start the morning drive at 5:30am and return by 11:30am. The evenings were a bit variable but returning by 6:30 pm was a must. During the drives we kept clicking as were charged by elephants and hippos, investigated by a curious lions, barricaded by wild dogs and then some more – actually lots more bird activity. If you are curious you can download the GPX file (3mb) and play it in Google Earth. It is interesting to watch…

The GPS track - download to play
The GPS track - download to play

The great company of Ajit Huilgol, Amit Sharma and V.P. Nurdeen with their constant humor and banter made the adventure a truly memorable experience.

Enough of blabber from me, here are some pictures of the camping activity taken by Vincent. Thanks to him for letting my use the pictures for this blog post. The wildlife pictures from my camera I will post real soon.

P.S. As an after though I feel compelled to add a postscript with a few negative points…. The trip had very less density of mammals specially the big cats, in 10 days we did not see a lion pride and not a single cheetah was spotted. The famous elephant herds of Savuti are all dispersed now due to the channel filling up after 25 years. We all wished that our host had done his homework better…