Dan's Adventure

The Okavango Delta is one of the last true areas of wilderness in the world, a natural wetland system spreading over 1,600,000ha of northern Botswana and the only inland delta of its kind in the world.The traditional method of traversing the delta is to use a mokoro, a dugout canoe, which is poled through the long grasses, lilly pads and islands. Mokoros are made from the sausage tree, so named because it has large sausage shaped fruits hanging from its branches. It takes 80 years for the tree to grow …

Chobe National Park in Botswana has a population of over 25,000 elephants, which when combined with the elephants in the rest of northern Botswana and Zimbabwe, forms the world’s largest concentration of elephants, over 120,000. There are so many, that culling is being considered in Chobe as there is not enough vegetation to sustain them all. Arriving at Chobe at 6.30am for an early morning game drive our hopes were understandably high, I expected to see a lot of elephants. Driving around for 3 hours we spotted numerous elephant foot …

Victoria Falls themselves weren’t that impressive, but standing right on the edge with the Zambezi river flowing around the rocks I was standing on was spectacular. Victoria Falls is the longest falling curtain of water in the world, running on both the Zambia and Zimbabwe sides of the Zambezi. I only visited the Zambia side, as it would have cost an additional $100 to go to the Zimbabwe side after you pay for a double entry visa for Zambia, a visa for Zimbabwe and the entry to the falls on …

While watching zebra after zebra walk passed in the Masai Mara there was one patch on which zebras would constantly drop down and start rolling on their backs, seemingly scratching an itch. One after an other they would queue up to use the same patch of ground, maybe it was deemed to be a safe spot or maybe it had particularly good scratching qualities, whatever the reason was it was pretty amusing to see zebras rolling around.

Victoria Falls Bridge is in no man’s land between Zambia and Zimbabwe, 111m above the Zambezi river. Approaching the bridge I expected my fear of heights to kick in and prevent me from jumping from it. As my ankles were wrapped in 2 towels and a cord was used to bind them together, I still remained calm and listened to the safety guy count down from 5 to 1 before screaming “BUNGEEEE!!” and launching myself myself from the platform, hurtling my body towards the Zambezi. The bungee jump was over …

I’ve been in Livingston for a few days now and over that time I’ve managed to get my Serengeti photos and Ngorongoro Crater photos uploaded. Like the Masai Mara photos, they are still a reduced size as although the internet here is the fastest I’ve come across, its still painfully slow to upload photos.

“This one makes my bum twitch like a rabbit’s nose” announces Scotty as we approach “Gullivers travels”, rapid seven on the Zambezi. A grade 5 rapid, and the most technical that we are to face, requires Scott to navigate us between two rocks, named the goalposts, before hitting a series of large waves. Going between the goalposts is the more difficult option, we could have gone around, but we opted for danger. Our choice, on looking back, wasn’t the best as the water turned out to be too shallow for …

Lake Malawi covers one fifth of Malawi and is the third largest lake in Africa. We spent five days travelling from the border with Tanzania in the north to the border with Zambia in the south, spending a total of four nights at three different beach resorts on the lake. Usually arriving at around lunch time, we would pitch our tents on the beach and then spend the rest of the day relaxing on the beach, playing cards and playing frisbee. The nights were similar but usually involved a few …