Moremi GR - Day 2

The start of the gravel just outside Shorobe

A surprisingly good nights sleep considering we were right next to a road with a few loud bars nearby, we were up at 6am to have breakfast and get going by 7am.  It’s a 100 kilometer drive to Moremi, which the first 20 km is potholed tar. After Shorobe where we stopped to drop the tyre pressure and pick up some firewood, it was onto the corrugated sandy 80km drive to Maqwee gate of Moremi.

The road, although very corrugated, wasn’t as bad as we had feared and just over 2.5 hours later we arrived at South Gate, otherwise known as Maqwee having seen giraffe, elephant, kudu and plenty of lion spoor.

South gate entrance is a 2.5 hour drive from Maun

While Dru sorted out the admin, Cheryl sorted out the car to be able to access the cameras. That’s when she discovered that the firewood had dislodged in the back of the bakkie and knocked the gas bottle open so gas had been seeping out for who knows how long. So now we wait to see if we have 2 full gas bottles or only one!

Good news from the office though, they can give us a couple of nights camping at Maqwee, so we’ve decided to do 1 night after 3rd Bridge and see how it goes before moving onto Khwai.

Blackpool is new and Xini is now a network of tracks - for day tours from Maun 

Intel from the park guys told us there was both a pride of lions and a pack of wild dogs at Xini Lagoon, with cheetah being sighted at Blackpool.

We opted to skip Blackpool until we stayed in the area, instead going to Xini as it was on the way to 3rd Bridge anyway.

Plenty of sand between South Gate and third bridge 

It took us an hour to get to Xini and then there was a maze of roads in the area. It would be so easy to get lost and I don’t know how we managed to do this in past with just a map, but this time we had the Tracks4Africa app to keep us on track.

Buffalo are never happy to see you

Dru was a bit worried about us taking too long and wasting too much fuel. And in his panic to reverse the car, managed to hit a stump so now we have a bumper that looks like it wants to fall off.

Deep breaths and we were on the road again. There are 4 bridges that need to be crossed and we never know if they are up (they’re not maintained very well) but both 1st and 2nd bridge were both dry so we could just bypass the bridge.

First bridge, dry to drive in the sand

We did catch a nice sighting of a herd of about 20 elephants that were headed towards us so we stopped the car to catch some head on shots. When they were about 30 meters from us they stopped and just stared at us and we quickly worked out they wanted us to move. We moved the car about 10 meters forward and sure enough they carried on their way, crossing the road just where we had been parked. That’s non-verbal communication between species!

Nice start to Moremi

The waters are flowing from the Angolan highlands and slowly starting to seep into the delta. Although it’s the dry season so the roads are very sandy and the seasonal waterholes are all dry, the delta waters are now starting to arrive and that’s when we saw our first lechwe of the trip, a water dependent antelope that we always see in Moremi hanging around the flood waters.

Dru thought he had spotted another one, but when Cheryl looked it turned out be a male lion! He was walking around at one o’clock in the afternoon.

We thought he would drink but instead skirted around the water, walked towards us and then crossed in front of the car and headed into the scrubby bush where we lost him. A really nice and unexpected surprise.

Big guys was walking around in the middle of the day

We arrived at 3rd bridge camp not long after, where we checked in got our campsite before sorting out our lunch of chicken rolls and relaxing a bit in the campsite before the afternoon drive.

The iconic 3rd bridge, there is no way around this one with deep water

We decided to check out 4th Bridge and Xakanaxa areas for the afternoon and although we didn’t catch any cats, we did have a nice, albeit quick, sighting of a honey badger and our first sightings of Tsessebee in years.

Tsessebee, we have only seen it in northern Botswana 

We capped the evening drive off with a sighting of 2 black backed jackals and 2 spotted hyenas before heading into camp.

That wasn’t the end of the hyenas because just as we had set up camp after showers, a hyena strolled through our campsite. He totally ignored us while walking through intent on going to the next one now that he had seen there was no food for him in ours.

Black-backed jackal, always up to something 

We didn’t see him again for the rest of the evening although I’m sure he would be back once we went to bed.

Making plans for the next day, we heated our home made stew and enjoyed a glass of wine under the stars with the fire going, ready to see what Moremi has for us in the morning.

Nights in the open campsites are just special