Okavango Delta — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

Ever since I pored over National Geographic magazines as a kid, I’ve thought the Delta was so cool. I never had a specific goal to visit it, but once this safari trip was taking shape, a visit here was a given. We took a small plane in to Splash Camp, where we stayed for 3 days, and the expansive views were gorgeous…

… and green and wet!

Before I continue further into our fantastic time in the Delta, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this video of our last night in Chobe Elephant Camp. (usual video alert that you should open this post in a browser by clicking the link at the end, so you can see the video) As I had related, there was a pouring rain the first night we were there, and 2 nights later, we saw the fruits of this watering. Termites wait for just such a rain, to develop wings and disperse to start new colonies. This was our open air dining room, which we quickly abandoned as the dive-bombing was becoming unbearable -

The next morning I found the abandoned wings on our front porch -

Okay… back to the Delta… We landed and collected our bags at Baggage Claim…

… and headed off toward camp…

So much water! And so many animals!

Wildebeest, Tsessebe (with babies) and Zebra

And this was all just on the 45 minute drive to our camp from the “airport”. More Lechwe…

A Steenbok was hiding in some bushes -

We finally drove into camp for dinner…

.. before we headed back out on a night drive. There we saw something I never in my life thought I’d see — an Aardwolf!

According to my research, this is “an insectivorous hyena-like mammal”, with its name meaning “earth-wolf” in Afrikaans and Dutch. Steve got a video of it, showing how difficult it is for us to try and photograph animals on a night drive.

A common sighting at night were the Spring Hares -

The next morning we went on a long game drive to try and pick up cheetah tracks, and see if we might be successful in finding him. Well, we found her as she kept wandering and spraying bushes and trees with urine, announcing her presence in the area for any males. She finally rested for a bit…

… so we could admire her beauty…

… and wonder why the top of her head looked dirty. Enlarge that picture above to see that it’s just the spots on top of her head looking more prominent at that angle. I loved being able to see that she has little lighter spots in between the bigger, darker, nearly perfectly circular ones -

She then caught sight or wind of a zebra herd…

… but must not have been very hungry, since she just walked away -

I was thrilled to be able to spend such a length of time this close to such a beautiful creature, as this was one of my strong desires for sightings on this trip.

This was the beginning of baby season…

Be back soon…