Dear Jozef, Joyce, Gerard and Untamed team members,
This Botswana experience of nine Flemish people was very successful in many ways:
- The organization was excellent! (Congrats!) All transfers went seamlessly after each other
- More than good food
- Many different habitats each with their own antelopes and birds
- All the staff at the lodges were extremely friendly and happy to see tourists coming back post-covid year. (The occupancy was still less than half and often our group was alone, which benefited, for example, the quality of boat trips.)
- All the local guides were excellent although Max in Linyanti stood out. We saw how he discovered tracks of wild dogs and how he could read the time that had passed since those dogs passed in the sandy subsoil. How he could know by following circular tracks where an impala kill was (which he subsequently found) and how he would then look for a straight track starting from that kill which took him to the underground den of a family of wild dogs 500 meters away . Max is a phenomenal tracker, and also a very good birdwatcher. We seriously congratulated him in a speech, and honored him appropriately. (If you ask the fellow travelers how we expressed our gratitude at the end of each Bush Camp, they can certainly provide nice details.)
Some of the many top moments:
- A young male leopard jumps out of his 'leopard tree' at lightning speed
- Five puppies wild dogs playing at their 'den'
- A Bradfield's hornbill grabs a flap neck chameleon
- Twenty crocodiles feast after a dead roll of a dead elephant on the side of the Chobe river
- A pack of lions hesitates at first with their upper lip tucked, then leaps one by one across a shallow narrow waterway in Kwai
- A couple of shalow turacos react to my (played with an amplifier) sound, and come to show their beautiful feathers (in flight the deep red wing halves are really flashy in the canopy)
- Night drives gaven sightings van civet, genet, African wild cat, honey badger en square-taled nightjar
- Bad-tempered hippos open-mouthed chase a pair of wattled cranes on the Khwai swamp plain
- A helicopter flight (included in the price if you book a Bush Camp for three nights or more!) over the Khwai swamp plains yields 1,500 photos in 30 min of groups of hippos, elephants, buffalo, wildebeest, giraffes, a variety of herons and pelicans in a swamp pool, etc.
And then there are the many gems of birds:
Crimson-breasted shrike- malachite kingfisher- green backed camaroptera - barred owlet- pearl spotted owl - African scops owl- Verreaux's eagle owl -southern cordon bleu - violet-eared waxbill - white helmetshrike - the many colorful woodpecker species - collared pratincole- the many heron species including the goliath - the many antelopes including the roan- common duiker- greater kudu- ibex - impala - puku- red lechwe… Actually far too many to mention!
We had our camera shoot twelve frames per second at flight images and came home with 30,000 pictures….
Big thanks for another unforgettable adventure!
Cordial greetings!
John V.