Africa Trip Day Five
Day 5 and another transition day. Today I’ll be heading to the Pangolin Voyager, which is a houseboat where we will be spending 3 nights on the Chobe River and heading out on numerous photography excursions on their photo boats. But before going on to the houseboat, we have time for an early morning game drive in the Chobe National Park. We left the hotel at 5:50am so we can be at the Park entrance right at 6am, opening time. We then spent about 5 hours driving around the park looking for wildlife. We had some birders with us on this drive, so we did take some time to see quite a few birds.
After returning from the game drive, I had to quickly pack up and checkout to get ready to move to the houseboat. Enjoyed a nice lunch and then waited in the lounge area for about 1 1/2 hours where I started my twice daily routine of moving photos/videos to my computer and then backing them up. I met the 4 other people I would be hanging out with for the next 7 days, and then we headed over to Botswana immigration on the Chobe River. We arrived at a small building next to the river, where we checked out of Botswana, got into one of the Pangolin Photo boats, headed about 10 minutes down the river to the other side, which is Namibia, off-boarded the boat and walked to Namibia Immigrations, checked in to this country, walked back to the same Pangolin boat, then headed down the river to where the Pangolin Voyager was docked. Once boarding the houseboat, we went to the lounge for a briefing on the accommodations and some safety information. During this time, the staff moved our bags to our rooms. Unfortunately, I forgot to do a video of the room (same for the Pangolin Lodge), but it was very comfortable for a boat. It had a large bed, at least queen, maybe even king sized, ensuite bathroom with shower and enough plugs to keep everything charged. Very quickly upon moving into the room, I got my camera equipment ready and moved back onto the Pangolin photo boat for our afternoon/evening outing. While on the houseboat, all our outings will be on the river. Because the houseboat can go farther upriver, we are able to explore areas that we cannot reach from the lodge, but the houseboat won’t be moving until tomorrow afternoon. Here are some photos from this outing.
We came back in the evening and had a wonderful dinner, got to know each other, and after a couple gin/tonics headed to the room where once again, move and backup, then to sleep for another early morning departure to what will turn out to be one of the most amazing photo locations I may ever experience; Lily Land.