Khansi to Planet Baobab

We were all awake by 5am with the birds. As usual I was first up and really wish Pieter would show me where the stuff was to boil the kettle and make coffee so I could just get in with it rather than wait 2 hours for everyone else.
As everyone else was still in bed I grabbed my camera and took some pictures of the woodpecker that visited our camp every day, Then I checked the camera traps and to everyone’s surprise we had been visited by an elephant and a hyena in the middle of the night, and nobody had seen or heard anything.
After coffee we all packed up and then hit the road heading for Maun.It would be an 80km drive on nothing but dirt roads doing a game safari outside of a national park.
We set off around 9am and the first 40km were pretty quiet as we expected but also slow with a top speed of 30kph then at 1pm we stopped for breakfast/lunch and as we ate a huge black cloud started forming. By the end of lunch at around 1:30pm, the rain had started and it got heavier and heavier, the roads turned from sand and clay into a boggy mess and then into a river. It was quiet scary and we lost sight of the road several times as Caren the car sunk up to the windscreen.
About 90 minutes down the road as the rain eased a little the car started to make a scraping sound so Pieter and I jumped out and realised that the fuel tank protector had been pulled away from it’s mountings by the water.
To fix it we needed to get under the car, and it was still raining and the road was also 2 inches deep in running water. To get underneath I decided to strip down to just my boxers leaving my dry clothes in the car and then dived under the car in the freezing, gravel soaked water.
We managed to push the protective cover back up but we knew it wouldn’t hold without a bolt, which we didn’t have, and there was nothing to cable tie it to. So we made the best of a bad job and then I stripped completely naked before jumping in the car and putting my dry clothes back on.
The rain continued for hours. We found a baby terrapin in one of the puddles it was so bad, then we saw a tower of giraffes with 3 babies and finally, with the rain still coming down we got to the campsite of Planet Baobab.
4 days ago we all had the chance to do laundry but we checked to see if we should and Pieter said no, we’ll be able to do it here, there will also be electric WiFi and food served.
It had rained all day so you can image how pissed off we were when we realised we had to sleep on flooded campgrounds. There was no argument in that, we certainly didn’t have a choice and if there had been one, Ellie, Myself and Becky would have chosen somewhere else, but being good sports we just went along with it. Then, on opening the trailer with all our bags and clothes in we realised it had Been flooded and all our clothes were soaked and so was Becky’s mattress. And then we found out we had no electric at the site we had paid for, and there was no WiFi.
I was really annoyed, and what was Pieter going to do about it? Have a shower......,
Now I was more annoyed, but we set up the 2 tents under a bbq shelter so hopefully they won’t get any wetter, and fortunately Ellie had her blow up mattress so Becky borrowed that.
We had dinner in the restaurant, which somehow Ellie and I ended up paying for so now Ellie is annoyed aswell but on the way back from dinner we found an African Pygmy Hedgehog and that cheered everyone up. I’m really hoping the sun is going to be shining tomorrow and everyone will be in a better mood. Now you can see why people in the UK are so miserable all the time.
At 10pm we all went to bed, it’s still thundering and raining.Read more