I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Chobe National Park
After lunch, we split into three groups for our first game drive in Chobe National Park. This is Lucky, the wonderful guide and driver I would have for the next three days.
This park is much more open than the game reserve in Victoria Falls. There, thick bush crowded right against the roads, and we marveled at how the drivers could figure out where they were going; all of the roads looked exactly the same to me.
In Chobe, there seemed to be a lot more grassland, with the frequent stark silhouettes of dead trees. I asked Lucky about them; there were so many I thought maybe it was some strange African species that had just gone leafless for the winter, but he confirmed that they were dead all right, and explained why: elephants. They love to rub against trees, and eventually they rub away all the bark and the tree dies.
The greenery around the bottoms of the dead trees is the highly versatile woolly caper bush. Knobs of it punctuate the grasslands, sometimes growing so tall they look like fuzzy spineless trees.
Mostly it's a climber. It twines around some of the dead trees like reborn foliage, and bursts like treetops from termite mounds.
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2012
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April
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- Sunday bird blogging
- Sunday bird blogging
- The end of all our exploring will be to arrive whe...
- Leaving Zambia
- Paul
- More pictures of the children
- Village children
- Sausage tree
- Dancer
- Orchestra seating
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- Morning on the Zambezi
- Zambezi sunrise
- Waterbuck
- How lovely to see you again
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- Tracking
- Walking safari
- His path was marked by the stars in the southern h...
- Night drive
- Close encounters of the elephant kind
- Bones
- Lower Zambezi National Park
- Sundowner, continued
- Sundowner
- Royal Zambezi Lodge
- Flight to Lower Zambezi
- Airport sign
- Welcome to Zambia
- Safari canopy
- More birds of Chobe
- Birds of Chobe
- Nursery
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- Fish eagle
- River, Day Two
- Hippo Island
- Is that an oxpecker on your back or are you just g...
- Like mother like child
- African wild dogs
- Lion
- Another Chobe sunset
- If elephants can do it, so can I
- Mud wrestling
- I'm in the mood for love
- Crocs
- Salad spinner
- Just like a baboon cowboy
- A bloat of hippopotami
- Way down upon the Chobe River
- The butterfly effect
- Dancin'
- Baboon life
- Giraffe genders
- Waterbuck
- Young male impalas
- Impalas
- Why did the buffalo cross the road?
- Botswana sunset
- Under African Skies
- Sky, with elephants
- Photographing elephants
- Learned behavior
- Elephants. A LOT of elephants.
- Why giraffes rarely win at hide and seek
- Kudu
- Chobe National Park
- Chobe Safari Lodge
- Welcome to Botswana
- Frisbee time
- The Lion and the Little Red Bird
- Class rules
- School visit
- Livingstone
- Giraffic Park
- Buffalo Death Glare
- Faces of Victoria Falls
- So you want to be a trillionaire
- Victoria Falls signs
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- I've got sunshine on a cloudy day
- Moonlight serenade
- Zambezi sunset
- My, grandma, what big teeth you have
- River horse
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- Sundowner cruise
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