Rhinos, bananas and potholes

After the first night in Kruger National Park we spend another day and a half driving around the park and observing the animals. We're very fortunate to spot a leopard lazing up a tree, but the lions are elusive - looks like we'll have to wait until Tanzania to see them. We take a drive at sunset, and enjoy a magnificent vista as four giraffe lope gracefully through the grass before the setting sun.

Following our time in Kruger we head north-west through Limpopo Province in South Africa in the direction of Botswana. We are now into a more rural area, and small towns of tiny concrete or brick homes are dotted through the landscape. The towns have power to the dust-surrounded homes but there is little other infrastructure. Countless stalls and small shops line the roadside; orange-sellers, hair salons, carwashes and mechanics. Children play in dusty yards with soccer balls, men and women sit by their stalls at the side of the road, and people trudge the dusty roads in every direction.

We stop for a break in the afternoon at a shopping centre in a reasonably large town, where the rickety street stalls are contrasted against the modern shops, including KFC. A large armoured police truck guards the carpark, but the resting policeman doesn't seem too concerned. We decide to ditch the modern stores in favour of the stalls, and head off in search of bananas. We walk through the stalls feeling conspicuous, and pick a stall where a lady sits with her children. Not sure whether to bargain or not, we ask for a price. It's one rand per banana, or six rand for a pack. At that price (six rand is about AU$1) I wouldn't feel right bargaining, so we take a pack and hand over the coins. The lady may well have put the price up for us tourists, but we don't mind. The lady smiles as her children hide behind her. We laugh with her, and Mariska says she has beautiful children. The bananas are great!

The drive ends at Polokwane Game Reserve, near Petersburg, where we chill and play some hacky sack with some others in the group (mostly Aussies, plus some Danes and Canadians).
Later in the afternoon we take a drive through the reserve and come face to face with a huge white rhino, who comes within metres of our truck and looks as if he's thinking of charging! It is an immensely powerful animal.

On Sunday we leave camp at 7:00am for the long drive across the border and into Botswana. We cross the border without difficulty, and exchange some of our South African Rand for the Botswana currency, the Pula. Driving on it is soon apparent that the living arrangements are somewhat different here. In Botswana there seems to be more of the original village arrangements, with small mud huts in compounds with pens of animals. Our guide Khensani tells us later that as there is plenty of land in Botswana, the government gives plots of land to people to encourage agriculture.

We drive on through Francistown, Botswana's second-largest city (in fact Botswana's second of two cities!), and stay at Nata Lodge - an oasis in the desert. The next day we drive on north through Botswana heading for Chobe National Park. The road is still bitumen here, but in parts we slow to a crawl to navigate our way around potholes which are four feet across. The land by the road is unfenced, and goats and donkeys roaming the roadside create further havoc!

That afternoon, after setting up camp at Kasane, Botswana, on the Chobe River, we take a sunset boat cruise in a little dinghy on the Chobe River. It is a beautiful, wide river, and its meeting with the Zambezi not far from here forms the intersection of the borders of Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. We spot plenty of animals - birds, elephants, baboons, crocodiles, giraffe, and then a whole herd of hippopotami wallowing in the shallows by a grassy island.
The sun sets over the river as an elephant wades home from one of the grassy islands to the river bank, just twenty metres from us.