Day 9 - Final morning ride

There it was: The last time getting up in this beautiful lodge and environment in Botswana. Mpho woke us up again at 6am with fresh tea, but it was truly hard to get out of our beds. Can't we stay here forever and enjoy this moment non-stop? We had to pack our bags quickly, getting dressed for horse riding and lovely breakfast.

Today we only had to be back in the horizon camp of Botswana around 10.30am, giving us a good ride when we'd start at 7am. You'd think: What can you see for that morning ride, probably some antelopes and that's it? Nothing less was true: we saw our friends the giraffes again and experienced crazy stories with elephants and galloping zebras!

The story with a young boy elephant started quite soon after we took of with the horses from the camp. The young elephant wanted to charge at us, and unlike last time, Mpho seemed to struggle to scare him away. He seemed to always come back at us, ignoring his hand clapping and whistling. We saw the adults’ approach from the other side of the hill, so Mpho knew it wasn't the safest place anymore for the group. However, as explained you can never let the young boy elephant win from you by charging. They simply cannot learn that as good behaviour towards humans. So Mpho finally succeed in scaring him away by going really close forward to the animal himself, so that the group could be led to a safer place. What an amazing moment to experience on our last ride!

When we were almost arriving back at the camp, we had another amazing moment. All of the sudden a group of zebras was scared by our gallop, so they all ran away in this amazing group formation with their beautiful stripes. They came across our path, cantering along with us, almost so perfectly synchronised. For a moment I felt residing in some sort of dream, with stripes, horses and beautiful sunlight. It was the perfect closure of our last ride. Thank you Botswana, thank you Hitachi my horse, thank you Mpho and Mmushi!!Read more