Today we drove to Botswana, where we’ll stay for two days. This is a picture of us at the point in the river where Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia meet. It’s the only place in the world where the borders of four countries touch.
These next pictures are of our boat ride up the Zambezi River. It was a beautiful evening! I noticed right away that our driver, Tom, was a lot like my driver, Jeremiah, back in Lagos. But, I really became skeptical when I realized that our tiny, rickety boat reminded me a lot of my car back in Lagos. We saw a lot of hippos and crocs, getting what felt like way too close to them and our engine kept having problems. On a couple occasions it flooded and it took Tom quite some time to get started again. It just didn’t seem to be clicking that constantly starting and stopping the engine was causing it to flood.
In these first pictures you’ll see the beautiful herd of elephants. We were so excited just to see one, but then the entire group came down to the water to drink while we just drifted closer and closer in our boat and watched, hoping that the engine would start when we needed it too. Beautiful.
As we kept going, Tom let us know that we had gone off of the main channel and needed to go down a small side area to get back on track. This once again brought back memories of what Jeremiah would do. So, my mom and I both look up the small channel. It is FILLED with hippos.…a hippo roadblock! Before we have a chance to say anything, Tom starts going full speed. With hippos in front, behind and on both sides mom and I just pray that the engine keeps going. But then it got worse. A mamma hippo with two babies decided that we got too close and started to come after us full speed. Luckily, the engine kept going and we sped on by. I had been excited to see hippos and crocodiles and hadn’t thought twice about seeing them in a tiny boat. Now that we were living our own combination of Fear Factor and a Disneyland ride, we’re wondering if we would be glad, to never see another one again. The rest of the boat ride was happily much less eventful.
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