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July 24th Okavango Delta, Botswana

Today I had to wake up super early for a sunrise bush walk.  The walk lasted about four hours, again I stupidly did it in flip flops even though I had my brand new new balance sneakers in my tent and completely ripped up my feet  The highlight of the walk was the extremely close encounter with elephants.  They were real close in the bush eating leaves off trees.  Our guide kept going closer and closer but knew exactly what he was doing.  He did tell us that if the wind had changed the elephants would have smelled us and possibly charged us.  I was confident in our guide Couks that he knew what he was doing.  He had told me earlier that this was his tenth year as a licensed guide which gave me even more confidence in his ability to not get us killed.

After the bush walk we came back, had a brunch, chilled out.  At around 100pm a bunch of us, both girls and guys went swimming.  It was a five minute walk and the water was cold and muddy.  Sarah didn’t get and took some great pictures using my camera of us swimming out to a shallow spot in the middle of the delta.  At 330pm the whole group took the mocorro’s to see the hippos.  They were in a place called the “hippo pool,” which was basically just a body of water where the hippos were likely to be since their homes on the ground were located on the shore.  These hippos were close, real close and there was nothing to protect us from them.  Hippos are the number one killer of humans in Africa after Malaria.  At one point the hippo appeared to be coming closer to our particular boat and Sarah got scared and made KC take us back closer to shore.  After observing the hippos we took a ride back during sunset.  It was nothing special considering our backs were to the sunset so I wasn’t really impressed.  When we got back we had dinner and after dinner the fun began.  After dinner, we built a large fire and the polers and guides who stayed with us for the past two nights sang songs for us.  These were traditional african songs and some of the popular african songs.  After they sang it was our turn to sing, and the songs had to be in our native tongue.  In front of everyone I did my national anthem, as well as take me out to the ball game, and row row the boat with the british and australian contingent.  I thought it was a great time, and most people did their national anthems and popular songs from their country.  After the singing, we all hung out around the campfire, listening to the animals in the wild cry at night.  The stars were out in full force and at this point my trip was satisfied.  I really wanted to see stars at night, listen to animals howl and camp in Africa and did all of those three things out in the Okavango delta in Botswana, how amazing.  I also tried to fix jin’s camera, who during the singing and dancing just left it in the sand behind the fire.  Eventually we got it fixed temporarily which was a miracle.  His camera is like Rasputin, it has been dropped in water, dropped in sand and just flat out dropped.



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