Savute to Ihaha – The Place Where African Sunsets Became Famous

Less than 5 minutes in the Landy en route to Ihaha we had a steenbok fly across the road in front of us in hot pursuit by three hungry wild dogs! One second later on the roads and you realize you miss such chance encounters. I had my first off road driving experience in the thick sand roads – requiring deep concentration to keep the wheels in the tracks no matter how much the thick sand tried to redirect you otherwise. After 2 hours on the road, we passed our first vehicle!

Our camping spot at Ihaha is just a stones throw from the Chobe River. Such a beautiful tranquil spot to relax for the afternoon. The only noise you can hear is the bee-eater birds killing wasps against the trees. We have three warthog visitors grazing around us, two fisherman in a mokoro paddled by and lots of birds. The campsite rules are very simple…”You MUST sleep in a closed tent or vehicle, or lions or hyenas may eat you!” … Enjoy your stay in our park!!” Big gulp as you read that!!

I’m on the blog and Deon’s making dinner so we can go out for a late afternoon drive and be back by sunset. We got the heads up that there was a pride of lions eating a buffalo carcass so we headed there for a first lion encounter…along with far too many other safari vehicles loaded with tourists. We realize how spoilt we were having Savute almost to ourselves on our drives.

The female lion and her three cubs were tearing the flesh off the decaying and not too pleasant smelling carcass. Male lions were in the den in the bushes but they were camera shy however Deon pretended he saw them with half his body out the window and the zoom going wildly on the camera and all the heads on the safari vehicles turned our way to see what we were seeing. Vehicles even came our way to ask if we’d seen the male lion. I’m hiding inside the vehicle holding back the tears of laughter as Deon tells them he saw two males and they just ran off into the bush. His new tactic to decoy the tourists!

On escaping the masses, we came across hundreds of elephants drinking at the river…from the tiny winy to the massive and all the sizes in between. On the race back to camp before sunset we had stretches of road with masses of buffalo and elephant on either side as they migrated from the river back into the bush before nightfall. Sunset over the Chobe is so spectacular…every shade of pink, orange and red reflecting off the river. When they talk of African sunsets, this must be the place that was created.

We are sharing our campsite with a family of baboons. They were all waiting for us when we got back hoping for a random door left open to ransack our food box. We outsmarted them on this round. They retreated to bed in the tree above us and were up at 6 with us this morning jumping through the trees.