On to Botswana

We left Livingstone early in the morning on Thursday (see, I told you we had to get up early all the time...) and headed off for Kasane in Botswana. We crossed the border by ferry, hid all of our wood-carvings, meat and dairy and ended up at Kasane Chobe National Park Safari Lodge. Botswana has this huge thing about foot and mouth (apparently recent?) so that you cannot even transport meat and dairy from one part of Bots to another - it is all confiscated at random checkpoints around the country - and you have to walk through a puddle at each checkpoint (with all of your pairs of shoes) to erradicate anything you might have picked up in the last 6 hours since the last checkpoint (which for us meant while we had been on the truck!!!!!). Botswana is extremely flat with kilometres and kilometres of bare, dry land and then in other parts of the country, with fields and fields of sunflowers, wheatfields and bush. It was amazing to find the luxuries of the first world available like large supermarkets and tarsealed roads - which meant drive times were shortened incredibly (we travelled 600km in 7 hours as opposed to 137km in 5 and a half hours in Kenya).
Jumping off the truck, our first encounter was with a massive pumbha (I love them!) who was obviously the camp pet and who just cruised around the campsite eating stuff. We were also severely harassed by a large number of baboons trying to steal our food, one of whom, when chased away by Grant, turned around, scratched the ground with its hands (just like a bull), growled and then charged Grant down. Of course, Grant was tough, stood tall and threatened him back. NOT. In all honestly, I have never seen him run so fast, as with all of the other boys around the campsite. Hilarious! For the rest of the afternoon, those damn baboons sat in the trees and threw crabapples at us as we went about our daily tasks. Very naughty. To add to our fear of being attacked in our sleep by baboons, lions and hippo's roared throughout the night.