Chobe National Park

It's probably news to most of you that Africa is actually quite expensive. Zambia in particular is one of the costliest countries in Africa to travel to. Before coming here, we weren't aware of this, nor were we prepared to spend triple in a day in Africa what we spent in the same amount of time in Europe.

When we arrived in Livingstone, we immediately realized how many amazing things there were to do there that we couldn't afford. There was river rafting, bungee jumping, boat rides, booze cruises, swimming holes, ultra-light flights over the falls, safaris, and many, many other fantastic sounding things that all cost a boatload of money to do. Having already gone through more than half of our entire trip budget in Europe, and still having 5 full months of travel left, most of these adventurous outtings were out of the question for us (but if we ever come upon bottomless travel funds, we're coming straight back here to do it all!).

The one thing we decided to spring for while in Livingstone was a day safari to Chobe National Park in Botswana. You can bungee jump anywhere, but when it comes to seeing giraffes, monkeys, crocodiles, and elephants in the wild, there's only a few handfuls of places in the world where you can go.

The safari lasted the entire day and was split into two parts: the first half by land through the park and the second half by boat on the Chobe river. We left our hostel at seven, crossed the border and arrived at the Kalahari Tour base in Botswana by nine. After having a light breakfast we hopped into the open sided safari vehicles and set off.

We hadn't even been in the park five minutes when we spotted our first group of elephants. Chobe has the largest concentration of elephants of anywhere in Africa (an estimated 50,000) and boy could you tell! Over the course of the day, we saw hundreds of them.

The absolute highlight though was this 2-3 week old baby elephant. He was playing in the mud and was perhaps the cutest thing any of us had ever seen. You can see him here hiding under his Mom, and we have a great video but not enough bandwidth to get it uploaded :/ 

We saw a variety of other awesome animals, too...

This giraffe...

These impalas...

Lots of dung beetles, rolling their dung...

These mongoose... 

And so many birds!

Then there was this pair of warthogs. We noticed that one of them, sadly, had had a run in with a porcupine-- strangely enough, it had ten or so quills coming directly out of its rear end. One of the people on the tour explained that porcupines and warthogs both live in underground burrows, and also that warthogs enter their burrows backwards. We collectively speculated that perhaps the warthog had been unfortunate enough to have backed into a burrow that was already occupied. Ouch!

If you look closely, you can see the quills (at the rear of the one on the left) 

After a great lunch at the Kalahari house, we walked down a short path to the river and got on the boat. The river itself made for a beautiful setting, and from the boat we saw lots of hippos, a crocodile, a monitor lizard, more impalas, lots more elephants, and some buffalo.

But my personal favorites were these monkeys, whose babies clung to them in the most adorable way!

About half way through the boat ride, the sky darkened and the wind picked up. A few moments later, rain started and the guides handed out these super stylish ponchos.

Feeling completely satisfied with all the great animals we'd seen, we decided to embrace the storm and make the most of it. On the upper deck, we discovered that if you held your poncho just right, you could lean your full weight against the wind.

Heading back across the border into Zambia, we agreed that our safari experience was well worth the splurge, and resolved to go on another as soon as we get the chance.