Victoria Falls (Zambia), Chobe and the Okavango Delta (Botswana)

Hi everyone, I’m in Maun, Botswana, and this morning Pablo left for Cape Town and then Bali. This week has also been very intense: from Windhoek, Pablo and I went to Zambia to see Victoria Falls (its indigenous name is Mosi-oa-Tunya: “the smoke that thunders”), then to Botswana’s Chobe National Park, and finally here in the Okavango Delta. Needless to say, all of these places are spectacular.

Victoria Falls are located near Livingstone, named after the Scottish explorer who was the first to reach these areas and who is more famous, rather than for his discoveries, for the phrase: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?", with which the leader of the expedition sent to find him, full of typical British formality and pomp, greeted him when he finally spotted a tall white man with blue eyes in a village among the local population.
The falls are 1.7 km wide (shared between Zambia and Zimbabwe), 108 meters high, and spit around one million liters of water per second. There is a path running parallel to the falls just a few hundred meters away, and after only a short walk you find yourself completely soaked by the spray. At times, it feels like being in the middle of a tropical storm. You breathe energy.
I don’t have many photos, partly because I didn’t have a wide-angle lens and couldn’t capture the full scale, and partly because soon after, my camera stopped working. I had covered it with a plastic bag, and while walking I kept it under my raincoat, but water still got inside. It didn’t work again until it had fully dried out.

Then we went to Botswana, to a small border town called Kasane, and from there we visited Chobe National Park on a boat trip along the river, which the park is named after. There were mostly hippos, either in the water or grazing on the grass on the small islands in the river, as well as crocodiles, many beautiful birds, and on the riverbanks monkeys and antelopes.

And finally, the Okavango Delta, which forms because this river never manages to reach the sea. It is explored in a traditional canoe called a mokoro, gliding through narrow waterways among reeds and tall grasses. Sometimes the channels are just wide enough for the canoe, other times a little broader.
Every now and then you end up in small pools where the noses of hippos appear here and there as they breathe before submerging again. Actually, they are the most dangerous animals in Africa! Fatal attacks from these far-from-lightweight quadrupeds far outnumber those of the more “famous” lions, crocodiles, and so on. The reason is that they are very unpredictable: almost always lazy and calm, but every now and then they suddenly go crazy, and then bad things can happen.

Photos:


And finally I’ve made it to the trillionaires’ club!! Ten trillion dollars (Zimbabwean, unfortunately). I’ve done it!!!! :-))



Victoria Falls.


Tourists at Victoria Falls.



After this photo, my camera died... but once it dried out, it worked fine again.



Woman in Zambia.



Small monkey.



Chobe, Botswana.



Crocodile.



Bird with a fish in its beak.



Hippo.



Woman in Botswana.



On a mokoro canoe in the Okavango Delta.



Okavango Delta.



Mokoro canoe in the Okavango Delta.



Flowers.



A village in the Okavango Delta.