This was my 5th safari, and Judy's 2nd. We picked Botswana because the first time we saw more wildlife in diversity and amount of any of the other countries I've experienced: Ethiopia, Namibia, Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa.
Also, Botswana has more elephants than any other country in the world. And on this trip we experienced more elephants than we did even on our first trip. At a watering hole in Savute the elephants kept coming and coming and coming until we believed we saw 60-80 in more than one herd all converging on this one watering hole.
This was a safari highlighted by several elephant events. On the Chobe River we all of a sudden heard loud trumpeting, and witnessed a bull elephant trying to mate with a female who wanted none of it. He chased her crashing through the water straight at us. Katembo, our guide, had to move our boat out of the way. (Katembo's name means "baby elephant").
Speaking of baby elephants there was this little guy practicing with an improvised baton:
And of course there were many other animals: crocodiles, zebra, giraffes, lions, leopards, hyenas, vervet monkeys, waterbuck, bushbuck, kudu, impala, mongoose, hippo, wildebeast, ostrich, wart hog, lechwe, sable and steenbok; and a whole host of birds. We had a special treat with three different leopard sightings with the best one about a half hour long following a mother leopard and her cub.
Here is a video slide show of our trip:
Botswana Safari 2018 from Mike Holtby on Vimeo.
