Lions, Leopards, Luxury, Botswana! (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Hello folks. Greetings from Argentina! But before we get to how much I love it here, I digress.

Last Friday I met my far-flying father at Joburg International Airport. We skipped off to a fancy airport hotel, casino and all, and had a lovely day lounging about. Dad brought me all kinds of treats, requested and not -- it was better than Christmukah! Among other things, I am the proud new owner of a Panasonic GS300 camcorder I'm still learning how to use. New toys! Now on top of 3.2 million still photos of my trip, you will all have hours of shaky video footage to look forward to. Not that my father himself wasn't an exciting present enough. Travel for awhile and you find out quickly how damn nice it is to see someone that's known you for more than 10 minutes. A huge treat.

The next morning we flew up to Botswana. We took a microscopic airplane into the Okavango Delta and spent a week at two different "camps". Both required escorted walking at night to protect guests in case of in-camp wildlife encounters though I didn't actually have any such encounters. The first "camp", if you will, was ridiculous luxury - the most comfortable beds, nicest sheets, hottest water, prettiest candles, and so on and so forth. The food was amazing and constant. Tea and starfruit and other snacks at 6 am and 3 pm, brunch at 11 am, cocktails and more snacks at 5 pm, dinner at 7 pm... it was hard to keep up with it all! But in between all the eating was absolutely incredible wildlife viewing. The Delta itself is spectacular in terms of the scenery - marshy grasses, narrow waterways, lagoons, forests, plains - each section more beautiful than the last. Driving around at the first camp we saw among other things, lions and giraffes, a huge herd of buffalo, crocodiles, elephants, imapala mating, kudu, hippos, and a trillion birds. The highlight however, the day of course I brilliantly left my spanking new videocamera at home, was a leopard. If you've been to Africa you know leopards are what legends are made of - the elusive animal people hardly see and if they do, it's usually sleeping in a tree a thousand feet away as per my Serengetti experience. But one fine day my dear dad spotted a leopard in the grass headed towards us for a sip of water. We followed it severely off road when it reteated into the bush and it led us to the site of its freshly killed impala. We proceeded to watch it dine, aka rip apart flesh and skin and bone and chow down, for what seemed like hours. We even went back the next morning and found him again, munching away. Experience of a lifetime.

The second camp wasn't quite the same thrill as the first in terms of sheer luxury, but it was still pretty damn fantastic by my standards and the views over the grasses were incredible. Our cabin was missing one entire wall so we could appreciate the nature most intimately. The coolest thing about the second camp was that instead of safari vehicles, we either rode in macoros (very low in the water wooden canoes propelled by a man with a wooden pole out of one of which a Seattle doctor was recently yanked and devoured by a large crocodile), or more often, we walked. Sometimes there were trails and sometimes we were just hacking through the bush with Bali our trusty Swana-almost-only speaking guide. There wasn't as much wildlife to see at the second camp as the first, but just the light changing on the grass was pretty beautiful and it was really nice to walk off some of the 18 meals a day. We saw a couple of zebras, a cute warthog, some giraffes, and thousands and thousands more birds. In addition, we had two exceptionally close encounters with large snakes. The first came out of absolutely nowhere and was suddenly on, yes ON, my foot and halfway up my leg. Identification wasn't definitive, but it was maybe a black mamba or a cobra or a puff adder. Whatever it was, obviously it was lethally venemnous and within miliseconds of biting me so my subsequent shrieking scream was entirely justified. For the record, though I never had a problem with them before, I now greatly dislike snakes. Another crossed our path the following day and Bali yelled "Run!" which wasn't particularly good for my blood pressure. Needless to say, we all survived and Botswana was a fantastic experience. Thanks, Papa.