Chobe National Park

Our group next headed for Chobe National Park in Botswana, leaving Namibia for the last time. Chobe is an amazing place and the home to over 25,000 elephants. We camped at a five star lodge so the facilities were quite nice. Internet was available, shopping good and the camp and grounds beautiful. We stayed at camp the first night and had an early wake up for a game drive where the viewing was excellent. We had another close encounter with lions and then warthogs, baboons and even oxpeckers. An oxpecker is a bird that sits on the back of a large animal and eats the bugs and parasites growing there.

Morning photos...

A pensive Baboon (kind of an oxymoron)



A cute warthog (another oxymoron)



A lion roadside from 20 feet away...



A lion yawning sequence from 8 feet away. (Don't worry, Susan was between the lion and me so I felt safe)









Oxpeckers on the back of a Cape Buffalo



Note: All of these photos were taken from a safari vehicle with a local guide. There were 6 people on our vehicle.

After lunch and some chill out time, we took an afternoon cruise to see the park from a different angle. Well, we certainly did. The elephants that were not around in the AM were all out bathing where we were cruising.















pretty ain't they?





Approaching storm...




There were lots of interesting things to see as the photos below show, and as a big rainstorm moved in on us, our captain spotted a real treat. On shore, hunting for its next meal was a leopard. Our boat tracked the leopard near the shore for over 30 minutes as the leopard paced back and forth looking for food. At some times, we were 100 yards away and others we were 20 yards away. We were so close, it seems like the leopard could have jumped onto the boat.









Chobe is my favorite location to date.

Many more places to go!