Today we will head off to Botswana in the afternoon, but first this morning we will go on a horse riding safari in Zambezi National Park. We are up early and the transport comes and picks us up shortly before 7 AM. Once at the stables, we get ready for our three hour ride.
We head off shortly before 7:30 AM and head into the park. We first come across some wart hogs and we are able to get up very close - one walks right under from Lars' horse. The advantage of riding a horse is that the other animals think you are just another animal and the smell of the horse covers up your human smell. Along with the wart hogs we see some impala.
We then wander down to the river and get a nice few of the water flowing by and towards the falls downstream. We come upon a water buck, who runs off when we get too close. We also go visit the huge baobab tree that is thousands of years old.
We finally see what we have really come for - the elephants. We are able to get up quite close to them. In fact, some of them just walked in our direction and we had to get out of the way.
We see a number of different groups throughout the morning. Some of them get upset and perform mock charges - this can be quite scary. The elephants are huge and when the spread their ears and start to run towards you - what a sight. At one point, even the guides got nervous as one elephant got quite aggressive.
It was a nice ride over varying terrain and was challenging without being too difficult. We got back shortly after 10 AM and dismount and prepare to head back. We get back to the campsite just before 10:30 AM and pack up our stuff so that we will be ready to go. We then head out shopping - we need to spend all the money that we won last night at the casino.
We buy some shirts and other presents and then after a quick lunch we go to the supermarket to stock up on the wine and booze. Alcohol is very cheap here, so we might as well take advantage of that. We then have to run back to the campsite and load everything on the truck.
Shortly after 1 PM we head off to Botswana. It is a short drive and we across the border into Botswana just after 2 PM and arrive at the campsite just after 3 PM. When we cross the border we have to walk through disinfectant. After setting up our tent in the small and crowded campsite, we spend the afternoon working on our journals.
After dinner, we take it easy around the fire and are in bed just after 10 PM as we have to get up early tomorrow for a game drive.