A full day of animal sightings
Life in Botswana day 1: after a grueling day of travel totaling 25 hours from our arrival at JFK airport to the beautiful Okavango River Lodge including over 17 hours on 2 airplanes, today we set of on our first game drive of the trip. After a brief class period where we reviewed the schedule and expectations of the class we loaded up the trucks and headed for NG 33 and 34, areas designated for wildlife protection. Once there we were treated to a few very lucky treats, the first of which was the first animal we saw was an old elephant who decided to walk across the road in front of our cars, it was a great way to start the trip and it only got better from there. We were treated to a wonderful array of wildlife in the areas, everything from warthogs and a mongoose to much more rare sightings of a leopard and 2 African wild dogs (a very lucky sighting because according to professor Stein they didn’t see any last year). In terms of sheer numbers the top three we saw were elephants with 11; giraffes at 31; and at the top, trumping all other animal sightings combined, were the impala, at a total of 454 sighted. Now looking forward to 8 days in Orapa. Submitted by: Christopher Adschiew
