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23rd april - 9th may

Overlanding across Afica in our Land Rover Defender: Botswana

Andy Lees
2006-05-16 15:19:02

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reverse and we gave him his space. only once he'd calmed down and moved to the side of the road did we dare to approach, slowly at first, then quickly once we were past.

at savuti we were relieved, and frankly a little surprised, to find that the warden had radioed through our details and sorted our booking as she had promised she would. we set up camp amongst the broken branches and elephant footprints beside a dried up river bed. behind us, the shower block looked more like a military specification nuclear bunker. apparantly all previous structures had their roofs torn off by thirsty elephants. it didn't look like they were taking any chances this time. the earth filled concrete walls were several metres thick. yes, metres! the land rover was suddenly beginning to look very flimsy. if they could smell the water in the toilets, what about the water in our jerry cans? if an apple was worth opening up a land rover for, what else did they like? did they want our fruit juice and would they know it's in the fridge? and if they did, would they be able to deal with that fiddly tin foil seal? these questions certainly began to trouble us, but it was also exciting stuff, the very reason we were out here in the first place. the only thing worse than being ransacked by several tons of pachyderm would be not to see one at all.

we needn't have worried. half way through lunch we were alerted by the sound of breaking branches. a large grey head emerged from the bush a few metres beyond the land rover. claire jumped into the driver's seat, plate and fork still in hand. i hurriedly collected what i could from the scattered preparations of our cooking; pots and pans, jerry cans and scraps. as the beast lumbered closer, and considerably larger, i was still pondering whether a herbivore would be interested in chicken chow-mein and whether or not it would be best to just let the elephant take our water, rather than making him smash his way ...