Stunning Savuti

The Savuti River Channel is situated about halfway between Maun in the south, and Kasane in the north. That may sound like a "shortcut (rather than taking the circuitous 8hr drive via Nata), but I'll never get my Volvo there. It was actually less than 100km from our campsite in Magotho to Savuti, and pretty much the same again to get from Savuti to our next stop at Mwandiview (near Kavimba, on the border with Namibia). But each of those stretches takes 3 to 4 hours, while enduring an "African massage". There were dust bowls, corrugations, deep sand, dips, humps, ruts, and a kind of side-to-side that had our cargo playing ping pong across the boot.

There are two separate tracks that diverge after you enter the park at Mababe Gate (technically Savuti is within the sprawling Chobe National Park) and it's a case of choosing the lesser of two evils. You can plough through the Sand Ridge Road, or bump around on the dusty Marsh Road. We'd learned from our previous trip that the Marsh Road is the least-worst option in the dry season, so we pointed our nose to the right and fastened our seatbelts. Frustratingly, our Satnav keep trying to push us back towards the shorter sand road, and about halfway along I made the error of listening to it. So our journey into Savuti ended up closer to the 4 hour mark.
I've been reflecting on navigation aids this trip, and I think we'll do our next journey without Satnav. Tracks4Africa offers an app for your phone and, when combined with offline Google Maps, you can easily get around. In fact, a lot of the bush tracks that we've been taking in national parks aren't on the Satnav anyway!

Savuti means "mystery" in the local language, and this refers to the unpredictable nature of the Savuti Channel. It can turn into a river and flood the marsh with life-giving water, then dry up again for no apparent reason. Right now it was definitely at the dry end of the spectrum, with water only available for the animals at two waterholes. One of these was "pump pan", replenished via piping from the nearby settlement. Given that this is where we were camping, at least we wouldn't need to go far for our sightings.

On our first night we overheard a massive commotion between elephants and lions. For those who haven't heard elephants getting angry, the sound can easily be mistaken for lions roaring. This battle continued on and off all night, and eventually gave way to just the roar of lions. We were sure that this signified a kill, so in the morning we went searching for the scene of the crime. We found plenty of footprints, but unfortunately we couldn't find any lions. We were treated to a gorgeous sunrise, though, so that made the detour worth it.

We did eventually manage a great lion sighting later that day, when an old male lion casually walked past the front of our car as we were lined up with the other safari vehicles. Combined with other sighting of adorable baby mongooses, and a family of playful jackals, Savuti proved that it was still worth the effort of getting there.Read more