Tree picture: We stayed at a campsite called "Planet Baobob" on our way North through Botswana and this was the largest of the trees, taking 15+ people to encircle it.
Tent picture: These were the tents we stayed in for the whole trip. We put up and took down the tents 9 times so we became pretty good at it. The whole crew was disciplined about getting ready in the mornings, which was important since we had a number of days where we had to get up, eat, break down camp and pack up the trailer by 6:30 am.
Whiskey: The exchange rate is 4500 Zambian kwacha to the dollar, so prices get outrageous. They have bills that go as low as 50 kwacha, or $0.01 so there are no coins. You can have a big wad of bills worth a total of $0.50. But, Zimbabwe is worse. At the border, you could buy a handful of bills from hawkers ranging from 10 trillion to 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars each, for around $5 usd. And, the $5 was mostly value as a novelty, not real value. The sales pitch was that you could become a trillionaire.
On the way south through Botswana our animal viewing was considerably better. We took an evening boat cruise through the Chobe national park and saw many elephants along the side of the river (the babies were cute and could hardly stand up) along with lots of hippos, crocodiles, baboons, impala, and cape buffalo. At another location we saw warthogs, several different types of gazelle, giraffes, and white rhinos. No lions, leopards, or water buffalo :(
After the safari ended, Annie and I rented a car and drove 4 hours south from Johannesburg to the Drakensburg mountains. The ridge in the picture is around 10,000 feet tall, and we took a 10 mile gorge hike that brought us to the base of the cliffs and to some areas where we could see Tugela Falls, the second tallest waterfall in the world.
Corruption - We had our first dealing with what appeared to be a corrupt cop two days ago. We picked up our rental car (an Opel Corsa), and as we left the main road from the rental area there we 5-6 cops gesturing for some people to stop and pull over.
We pulled over and the cop asked for my license. He looked at it for a minute and in a joking tone said "The state of Ohio doesn't allow you to drive in the country of South Africa." He showed me where his license had the letters SADC on the top of it and asked me where these letters were on my license. "Nowhere," was my casual reply. He said there was a fine of 1,500 rand ($250) and as we asked questions to clarify what exactly he was saying, he reiterated several times that he definitely was going to fine us. We asked why the rental car companies wouldn't ask about this law and he said they didn't want to lose customers. We asked if we could take the car back and he said no. I jokingly held up a handful of bills (probably not a great habit) and asked whether we could just take care of this then, and he pushed the bills down and told me to keep them out of sight. There was then a period where we just wanted him to tell us what to do, but he seemed to be talking in code and making no sense. Finally, after asking him point blank what to do, he started saying, "Just get me a cold drink." He repeated this line maybe 5 times without further instruction, and then I pulled out a 100 rand bill ($15) and offered it to him. He took it discreetly and we were on our way, not quite knowing what had happened. It appeared this was happening to others getting pulled over, and I'm sure rental cars are a perfect target.
Okay, off to the airport in a bit and returning tomorrow to internet connectedness and the ability to Google the answers to questions whenever they pop into your head.
Yeah, I would miss being able to get immediate answers to life's persistent questions also.
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