15 September 2025
A very leisurely start today with a 9.00am departure but we all wake up early anyway. We indulge in reading in bed, leisurely shower and an extra cuppa at breakfast.
Our only activity today is to drive around 350km to Chobe National Park – Botswana’s best known national park and our last chance to see a leopard in the wild. They are so well camouflaged and expert at moving stealthily through the undergrowth that we may well have near to several on our journeys but not realised it.
Initially it is a very busy road with lots of trucks and roadworks. The trucks are long-haul transporting supplies from ports (incl South Africa and Namibia) inland. Then the landscape opens out to plains with low scrub and the road is in very good condition. The scrub gets higher again and appears more lush but it makes for boring travel.
We pass through an area called Panamatenga, it has clay soil and is heavily commercially farmed mainly by Afrikaans who escaped from Zimbabwe and were given this area by the Government. Masses of sorghum and beans are grown, and sunflowers in season. We stop at what looks like a big agricultural centre being built, with lots of names on the gate including the big names Syngenta and Corteva. There is a vast area covered in netting that looks like grape vines. We have been promised excellent coffee grown and processed here but unfortunately the coffee truck has disappeared. The kind people at Eagle horticulture let us use their toilets.
There are plantations of mango, banana, and papaya as we travel further.
There are elephants and giraffe along the roadside – we barely take a photograph. How things have changed from the beginning of our tour when we were begging Wian to stop so we could take a picture of a springbok!
As get to Kazangula there are long queues of trucks. We learn that this is where 4 borders meet (Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe) and many of the trucks are going very long distances. Rather than crossing a border at this stage, we are heading west back along the Chobe River to stay at the Mowana Safari Lodge right on the river that is forms the border between Botswana and Namibia.
Aerian photography by Brian McMorrow, borders added by Julieta39, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a golf course at Mowana Lodge: one of the most dangerous in the world as elephants, hippos and more can be walking around. We are told not to go for a walk here, much as it might look appealing (although it is 39C so perhaps not that appealing).
We have a late lunch at hotel – no one wanted the buffet but for a la carte it would take 30 mins at least to come from kitchen. We decided that we would still prefer to wait – and ordered drinks. We couldn’t go to our rooms yet anyway. It was chaos and so disorganised. We never did sign the dockets for lunch because they were mucking around so much that we walked out on them and said we’d sign at dinner.
Despite the chaos, the lodge was a beautiful place to spend time. There was a huge baobab tree in the middle that the complex had been built around (as well as an even bigger one at the entrance), with a swimming pool and decks leading down to the river. There was a bar up on the second floor with magnificent views of the river so we all met up there for sundowners.
Later we had a buffet dinner, followed by some local entertainment.
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