I was sitting snugly between my mother and Seejo while we were on our “night safari drive”.  It was pitch dark outside and I was lazily following the beam from the huge spotlight that Peter, our tracker, was  flashing from side to side.  There was a slightly chilly breeze but I was wrapped up well with the warm blankets that the folks at Pom Pom camp had provided.  The evening’s safari, thus far, had been rather disappointing.

The Okavango Delta covers about 16,000 sq km and in that area there are only about 20-25 camps with each one accommodating about 20 odd guests.  Each camp, therefore, has its own private concession area where they can take their guests for a safari tour withoutbumping into guests from other camps.  For the tourists, it translates into a very personal safari experience where you do not have other vehicles waiting bumper to bumper to observe the same group of animals.  But it also means that animals have a large area to move about freely.  In most cases, the sheer population of animals ensures that you will see many of them eventually but that evening they were proving to be particularly elusive.  Our guide, Shaku, had driven quite far away from the camp  that day so we had longer night drive than usual.   It was our last evening/night safari and I had hoped to see  some of the wild creatures that we hadn’t seen so far but other than the ever present impalas , some kudus (large antelopes with a camel like hump and white stripes) and a horde of monkeys,  we hadn’t come across anything else. Continued…