Welcome to Botswana! Holy crap time flies! It seems like I barely had time to catch my breath after the last trip and suddenly, I’m on another adventure. I’ll start off by saying that Botswana was not easy to get to, at least not from the USA.

My trip started in Salt Lake City with a flight to Newark, and then a Holy Crap Adventures first, an airport change. From Newark I took a shuttle for a very circuitous tour of New York City to Kennedy airport.

After my ninety minute tour of NYC it was twelve and a half hours to Abu Dhabi, then about eight hours to Johannesburg, where I had to sprint what felt like a hundred miles to make my last flight just in the nick of time.

Finally, after roughly forty hours of airplanes, airports, and one shuttle, I arrived in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, extremely tired. I napped all afternoon, woke up just long enough to eat some dinner and then went directly back to bed. Not counting the day of sleeping, I’ll only be spending one day here. Gabs, as the locals call it, is a pleasant enough city, but there’s really not much to see here. I’m mainly here to rent a car and get some groceries for the next week. But Just because there’s not much to see here, doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to see.

The history of Botswana is long and somewhat complicated, involving several different tribes, Rhodesians (from modern day Zimbabwe), Boers from South Africa, German invaders from Namibia, and a British trading company. I have trouble keeping it all straight, but the three tribal kings in the monument above, Khama III, Sebele I, and Bathoen I, are the ones who traveled to England in 1895 to ask Queen Victoria to separate what was then known as Bechuanaland from the rest of the mess, paving the way for Botswana’s eventual independence.

After the Three Dikgosi Monument I spent most of the afternoon walking around downtown Gabs and visiting their very tiny National Museum. Most of the place is closed for renovations so it was more of a small contemporary art museum, but whatever, I enjoyed it.

The next morning I left Gabs in my new rental car at the ungodly hour of 4:30am and headed toward the Mashatu Game Reserve, way out in the furthest eastern tip of Botswana. I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore when I saw lion roadkill on the side of the road. It was a long drive and the last thirty miles of gravel road through the Tuli Game Reserve was pretty rough, but I saw a giraffe and an elephant on that stretch. I’ve also never been more nervous about getting out of the car to pee. Ha!

I’m also getting to experience driving on the leftside of the road. It was kind of unnerving at first and I felt like I really had to focus, but after a couple of days it was no big deal. It’s amazing how quickly my brain can just reorient itself. Anyway, Mashatu was recommended to me by a couple I met on a safari five years ago in Tanzania and I’m finally getting around to seeing it. Turns out, the tent camp is much nicer than I was expecting. My “tent” is like a really nice hotel room with my own private bathroom and a nice outdoor shower.

After checking in they took me out for my first game drive that evening. Apparently, Mashatu is super famous for leopards, which makes sense since that’s the first thing we saw. This momma leopard was just resting on the ground while her cub was resting nearby. Don’t worry, we’ll see more of her and the cub a bit further down.

On my last safari, and the only safari experience I had had so far, cheetahs were the one animal I didn’t see, so I made them a priority this time. And lucky me got to see a family of cheetahs on the first day! Awesome!

When we found the cheetahs they were just chilling on this mound. After a short while mom spied some impalas nearby and meandered to take a look, but it was getting a bit late for her to hunt. While she was doing that, we enjoyed watching the three cubs play around.

The next day we caught up with momma leopard and her ridiculously cute cub, but first, a hefalump sighting.

Today, we found mom and cub resting and playing in some trees. Mom did most of the resting and the cub did most of the playing though.

And I just couldn’t resist a leopard selfie.

In between all the leopard sightings, we saw six different individual leopards this day, we stumbled upon these elephants. They were marching with a purpose, heading to a nearby watering hole.

We hadn’t had any luck so far finding the local lions despite trying to track them all over the place. On day two, after dark on the way back to camp one of the guides spotted a male lion in the trees so we went to take a look. He was sleeping next to his recent kill, his belly full no doubt.

It was on day three that we finally caught up to the pride. It was late morning so they were just sleeping and being lazy, but I was pretty happy about it.

After the lions, we checked in on the cheetah family again. Mom was really keen to hunt. She stalked some impalas briefly, but they spotted her and ran away. She also eyeballed some warthogs for a bit, but decided not to make a move. While she was doing all the work, the cubs were always playing nearby, waiting for a meal.

It turns out the female leopards in the area are all related, there are three generations roaming around. We found the little cubs Grandma sleeping in the river bed. She looked almost dead, but she was just in a deep sleep in the sun.

Just a little further down the river we found grandma’s sister who has a slightly older cub of her own. They were on the move pretty intently.

We saw a male leopard one night going back to camp, but it was dark and he was super shy, so no pics. Bummer! On my last game drive before leaving we found another male leopard, though, a really big one. There was also a hyena sniffing around. We thought there was probably a kill nearby, but the hyena didn’t find anything, so he eventually just laid down for a nap, unaware of the leopard nearby. The leopard was sure aware of him though.

Next we went to check out one of the few watering holes where the elephants were having a drink.

Suddenly, the lion pride came out of the trees to do the same. They were both obviously wary of each other, but the elephants moved off and there was no trouble.

The lions one by one moved back up out of the river once they had had enough. The matriarch stayed back the longest, she was super thirsty apparently.

After that last game drive, it was back to camp to get my stuff. Then they drove me back to where my lonely car was parked and I was on my way to my next stop. Mashatu turned out to be pretty productive, and a nice start to this African adventure. Stay tuned, more to come…