🎥 Roadside elephants in Botswana
Our accommodation tonight… -S 🇧🇼
Just a quick taste of our leopard sighting today. -S 🇧🇼
Some lion photos from this morning’s safari. -S 🇧🇼
We have a bit of unexpected wifi, so here are some hippo pics from the day. -S 🇧🇼
We did a Mokoro canoe today in the Okavango Delta. During the canoe, we came across a bloat of hippos and I was able to capture them making noise. -J 🇧🇼
And some more photos from the Mokoro canoe:
Rainstorm in the Kalahari Desert
We’re off grid the next three nights, staying in a bush camp without electricity, near the Okavango Delta in Botswana. It might be awhile until the next update. Here are some photos from yesterday, which was mostly a long drive thru the Kalahari Desert during a series of big rainstorms. During a lull, we randomly pulled off to cook lunch out of the truck. We gave the leftovers to a local family who was very interested in our big vehicle and what the heck we were doing.
And we’re off on our 24-day safari thru South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania!
Here’s our vehicle for the journey! -S 🇿🇦🇧🇼🇿🇼🇿🇲🇲🇼🇹🇿
A Day Tour of Johannesburg
For our last full day in Johannesburg, we opted to do a day tour of some of the main historical parts of the city. The first stop was at Constitution Hill, which is at a former prison complex/military fort built by Paul Kruger in 1898 to protect against British Invasion and then to house Boer prisoners from the Anglo-Boer war. Starting in the early 1900s, political activists opposed to apartheid were imprisoned here, including Mahatma Ghandi.
Visiting Lesotho via the Sani Pass
We spent a few days in Durban primarily so we could do a daytrip over to Lesotho (pronounced “Luh-soo-too”). The tour is highlighted by driving the infamous Sani Pass 4WD route through the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park UNESCO World Heritage Site, culminating in a visit to the Highest Pub in Africa, and a short stop at a local village to learn more about local traditions. Lesotho is an interesting country. It is the largest enclave country in the world (aka, completely surrounded by a single other country), and the only one outside of the Italian peninsula.
We decided to spend more to have the hotel do our laundry for us today, so that opened up some extra time that we spent—magnificently, I’ll say—getting (quite excellent, yet cheap) 90-minute in-room massages. A rare treat, for sure, but also a great move after weeks of flights + long drives! -S 🇿🇦
Amarula is a great South African liqueur that my friend, Theresa, introduced me to when I visited her in Cameroon. So naturally I wanted some when we got to South Africa, but haven’t been able to find until tonight. Cheers, Theresa! -J 🇿🇦
Marking off South Africa on our quest to drink a Guinness in an Irish Pub in 32 countries. This makes 17/32 -S 🇿🇦 🍀🍻
Edit: So…this Guinness is terrible. We weren’t sure if it was just a keg gone bad, icky lines, or just how it tastes down here.
The answer: “Instead of barley, it’s typically brewed with maize or sorghum, which produces a more bitter taste compared to barley.”
Hluhluwe-iMfolozi National Park, South Africa
Photos from our visit on Friday to the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi National Park, a 230,000-acre preserve about 3 hours north of Durban, South Africa. Established in 1895(!), it’s the oldest nature reserve in the country, the only state-run park in KwaZulu-Natal where each of the big five game animals can be found, and is home to one of the largest populations of white rhino in the world. This was another private game drive (perhaps our last of the trip?
Enjoying a local Lesotho beer from the Highest Pub in Africa - 9439 feet above sea level🍻
Not a bad view, eh? -S 🇱🇸
Tala Game Reserve, South Africa
Our first tour out of Durban was three-pronged. The first stop—and the reason we booked the tour—was a game drive in the Tala Preserve. Up close with a journey of giraffe! This was our favorite moment of the day. Because we had a private tour, we were able to slowly exit the vehicle and walk a few feet out for a few photos. Pretty sure this is very much not allowed, but…well… Reminds me of an African version of that famous The Beatles Abbey Road photo.
One of the first experiences we had in Pilanesberg National Park was these two subadult rhinos fighting one another. -J 🇿🇦
Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa
Our first safari game drive in Africa was in Pilanesberg National Park, 2.5 hours outside of Johannesburg. The park was formerly farmland located inside a large volcanic crater, but was rewilded as (mostly) natural habitat. -S 🇿🇦 An elephant drinking water, which is dripping off its trunk. Our first giraffe sighting of the trip We watched this guy spray himself with water for a bit, though it was hard to capture given our angle.
Prayer time in the UAE -S 🇦🇪
🎥 Recapping United Arab Emirates
A short video recapping our time in the UAE. Some other observations: English was the primary language on most of the signs we saw in Dubai; Arabic was also included, but in smaller font below the English version. That’s probably not too surprising—nearly 90% of Dubai is foreigners. Each Emirate seemed a bit distinct