I’m not lyin’, I saw a lion!
…more like 30, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we could actually begin our Botswanan safari, we went to Livingstone, which is in Zambia, as a little warmup. Even though we were in our hotel for 98% of the time, I call it a warmup because…
Outside of our room on our veranda with zebras!
… there were safari animals inside our hotel! When we arrived to our rooms, we were greeted by some room service. Now, by room service, I don’t exactly mean food delivered to our room… I mean more that there were zebras grazing the grass outside our door. There were also monkeys, baboons, and tame impala (get it?). And when my mom and I were eating breakfast the next morning, my dad and Mia almost got trampled by a hungry giraffe while finishing up their “safari” walk. Another thing about this place is that our hotel is the “closest luxury property to Vic Falls,” so when we decided to go the falls, our trek was only maybe 5 minutes. If you have ever been to Zambia, you have probably been to Victoria Falls (which I will refer to as Vic Falls because it takes 5 seconds to write Victoria Falls and only 3 seconds to write Vic Falls). Something unexpected that I didn’t expect, and maybe you aren’t expecting either is that it is highly recommended to wear ponchos when viewing Vic Falls. When we crossed the bridge, I could see why we needed ponchos, but I could not see the waterfall. There was so much mist spraying from the waterfall, we couldn’t even see the water actually falling!
Nice to meet you!
(very wet) in front of the falls! Did you know that 500 million liters go down Vic Falls every minute?
After our stop in Zambia, we crossed the border of Zambia in a car, not an airplane, and we had to go through a looong process of border control even though there were hardly any other people crossing. After getting approved to go into Botswana, we drove to Chobe National Park in a safari jeep, because you need a 4×4 vehicle to go into the park. When we arrived at Chobe Game Lodge, we settled down a little bit but also had to get ready for our sunset boat cruise. In Chobe, we did several boat cruises, some at sunset, some at sunrise (rough) and some in the middle of the day. The top 3 sightings on our boat cruises were:
A watering whole near the edge of the water, where there were always tons and tons of elephants. It never disappointed. A funny thing about this watering hole is that the were also always baboons hanging around there, and when the elephants dropped some dung, the baboons would scamper up to the pile of poo and rummage through it in hopes of finding small seeds to eat.
Crocodiles in the water, but occasionally ginormous crocodiles on the shore! This only happened to us 2 times, but both times we went really close to them. Thankfully, they didn’t attack us, but what did attack us was…
A baboon! Maybe we got too close to it, or maybe it saw our food sitting out, but when we were pulling up to the shore to watch some baboons, one particularly big one decided to jump on the rail of our boat and bare its fangs at us. This wrecked havoc, of course, and soon, the other group of three that was with us did various things: one took a picture of the floor, one decided to make sounds to the baboon, and one decided to calmly sit in her chair. On the other side of the boat, Mia and I were getting the closest to the back of the boat as we could, and I don’t know what our parents were doing. Eventually, our guide, Elly was able to shake the baboon off, but Mia still calls that baboon the “badboon”.
At the elephant watering hole! You can see the clumps of dug-up dung on the ground and the baboons looking to the elephants expectantly.
Nile, Nile, crocodile… (this is a nile crocodile)
A baboon family at the same spot where the alpha baboon attacked us. Don’t you think they look a little bit like humans in this picture?
On land in Chobe, we saw quite a lot of elephants, impala, birds, baboons, and even over 30 lions (I told you I wasn’t lyin’)! The top three highlights on land were:
A family of warthogs that we could see from our balcony. One day when we were heading back to our room for a little bit of rest time, we found them chilling right in front of us! Eventually though, they scooted aside for us and we were able to enter our room.
A leopard! When we were going back from our morning game drive to eat lunch, there was a leopard spotted in the area. At first, we only saw it from a distance, but at some point it decided to cross the road so it was right in front of us! Even Elly was taking pictures because it was so rare. Another great thing was that there was only one other car with us for the duration of seeing the leopard!
The third thing that was cool, if not a little nasty (but that’s the circle of life, am I right?), was a pride of lions eating a baby elephant. It was gross because not only did the lions have blood smeared all over their mouths, but they were laying their heads up against the elephant as if it was a pillow, and you could see the the jaws and everything of the elephant. It a little stomach-turning to look at (we were very close to this, maybe 5 feet away), and it smelled HORRIBLE! It smelled like… well it smelled like a dead elephant, and as big of a stink as the calf was. It was kinda cool, but definitely gross.
10/10 for leopard camouflage 👍🐆
A little messed up, am I right?
Remember Zazu from Lion King? He’s real! This is called a zazu bird. (sorry, I couldn’t find any pictures of warthogs in Chobe, but I promise one later)
That’s basically all we did in Livingstone/Chobe! If you thought the animals here were cool, stay tuned for the Kalahari!
Livingstone/ Chobe staaaaaats!
Fun fact: Chobe National Park has the most elephants in the world, with up to 120,000 elephants! Another fun fact about Chobe is that all of their guides are female.😁
Where we stayed: The Royal Livingstone and Chobe Game Lodge
How 2 pronounce: li-ving-stun and choh(rhymes with go)-bee