Duma Tau camp is located in the private 290,000
acre Linyanti Wildlife Reserve that borders the western boundary of Chobe
National Park in Botswana.
The facility is lovely, the staff outstanding, food
great. Our guide named “Name” (short for Nametsecha) was friendly, personable,
and an excellent tracker. The morning game drive at 6 am came too early,
but was worthwhile as we had a rare sighting of wild dogs. They are beautiful
animals with brown and tan coloring in a patchwork pattern, and large round
ears. We watched them for a while as they played in a mud pool and lounged
around. When the alpha male and female left, the others soon followed, and so
did we—on the chance that we might see them hunt. Wild Dogs are the most
successful hunters of all animals—more so than lions or leopards. But the dogs weren’t that hungry, so we
left them and scanned the horizon for more animals, finding giraffe, zebra,
impalas and numerous birds.
In the afternoon a thunderstorm came out of nowhere, and a horrendous gale shot
sheets of rain through the screen windows and flooding the inside of our tent, as if someone had lost control of a
fire hose. The bed was drenched, our clothes, the floor, everything. The worst
of ‘everything’ was my husband's computer, which he’d left open on the desk. We weren’t the only victims, of course.
The whole camp looked as if a hurricane had struck (which it more or less had).
Over the next hour I moved us into to an unoccupied dry tent next door while
my husband went to the managers to get help for his drowned computer. They filled a
box with rice and stuck the computer in the box in the hope that the rice would
soak up the moisture.
And after all, how many people can say that their birthday
began with a sighting of a leopard chowing down on a newly caught kill? Name tracked a female leopard
to a tree where she’d just hauled up a baby impala for breakfast. Impalas are everywhere
in the bush. It’s said that if you go on safari and don’t see an impala, you
get your money back. And since the babies hang out together, like a pre-school
class, they’re extremely vulnerable to predators. The rest of the morning drive
included sightings of gorgeous lilac breasted rollers, blue kingfishers, a
colony of red and blue Carmine bee-eaters, crimson-breasted shrikes, as well as
a huge herd of elephants sloshing through a pond.
Later in the day my husband was presented with a cake—chocolate—and the staff sang Happy
Birthday in English, which I thought missed the point of celebrating a birthday
in a tent camp in the middle of the bush in Botswana. He received a nice present, though: The power button on his computer functioned again—a step in
the right direction.
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