Shark Sighting

I’ve tried as much as possible to make my blog posts chronological but I’m giving up. The trip has been chaos and the blog should reflect that as much as possible. This post is about our 4 nights of camping in the Moremi and Chobe National Parks in Botswana. The parks are located in the Okavango River Delta in northern Botswana and they’re about as far away from civilization as I’ve been. Once you enter the park there’s no food, water, gas, or supplies until you leave 300 miles later. The roads are a mixture of gravel, sand and huge boulders – no paved roads. Driving in the park hurts. Sometimes a tree branch hits you in the face through an open window, sometimes the car bounces so hard from hitting a bump that your neck snaps back against the headrest, sometimes an animal runs across the front of the car and you have to slam on the brakes or swerve into the deep sand and get stuck. Every moment of madness is makes the last one seem tame. I love it. Do-it-yourself-safaris are for maniacs that love fun.

During our first day in the park our car got stuck in the sand around 4 times. Each time we had to get out of the car and push as hard as possible to get out. It was all fun and games until an 8 foot puff adder, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world, slithered right by Karina’s feet. Once we got to the campsite life got spicy. The first campsite we chose is known as a hotbed of hyena terrorist activity. Not even half an hour after the sun went down we heard an awful scream from the camp next door. When we walked over to investigate we found out that a hyena had bitten a young boy and tried to drag him off into the bush. We quickly perked up and every few minutes we’d see several pairs of glowing yellow eyes circling the campsite. Hyenas are very timid animals and they run off quickly when approached by humans so we spent about an hour running around the camp with sticks chasing hyenas. We even played a local game called “bonk a hyena on the head with a rock.” Great workout. Everyone was pretty nervous about animals wandering around our campsite so someone came up with the brilliant idea of encircling the tents with our chairs. If there’s one thing animals hate, its chairs. The next morning everyone woke up and shared their stories of how many animals they heard walking around the campsite. It was getting ridiculous. Someone said they heard an elephant walking around, another person said they heard lions roaring next to the tent. At this point Mariano got all serious and told us to be quiet because he wanted to share something important from the evening. He then told us, “guys, I was so scared last night, I think I heard a shark in the campsite.”

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