Khama Rhino Sanctuary (Take 2!)

Hello to everyone back home!

This weekend was a long one thanks to the mid-term holiday break and the Maru-a-Pula staff have scattered themselves throughout Southern Africa. To do my part, I hired a car with a friend of mine (Julia Shore, another volunteer teacher and my next-room neighbor), borrowed bits of camping gear from everyone I know on staff, and hopped about 350 kms NE to the Khama Rhino Sanctuary. Now, my most avid readers may recall that this was the site of a rather unusual camping experience when my tour group attempted to stay there in December--luckily things went much more smoothly this time around! No swarming Afrikaaners, no movement of tents and belongings, etc.

In fact, even from the planning side this trip was a breeze! Apparently it's not high-season for tourists anymore, because when I called on Tuesday to book a campsite for the weekend I got the choice of any campsite, and only two of the 12 or so sites were occupied while we were there. We had a bit of a scare with the hire car because we left the booking of that quite late, but in the end the cheapest place did have cars available and we got one for a good deal. The only problem we anticipated was the 2WD/4WD problem, but renting a 4x4 was out of the question, so we decided to give it a go in the Corolla and dig ourselves out if we ran into too much sand.

Our drive was smooth, but a bit long without aircon. Luckily we found a variety of interesting local radio stations (interesting in many senses of the word) to keep us entertained, despite the rather noisy rush of air past the open windows at 140 kms/hr. Unfortunately our map was a bit deficient and we had a few tense moments on unmarked back roads (most of the roads in Botswana seem to be unmarked) before arriving at the rather tall and imposing gate of the Sanctuary.

Our first day there was also very exciting in many ways--the campsite we were given turned out to have a rather large and busy wasp nest in the central tree, the roads were completely unimproved sand tracks (our poor rental 2WD!), and the mosquitos were out in force--but we had a great time overall. On our game drive that evening we saw heaps of game and didn't even get stuck in the sand! I was driving (unfortunately?) and we did get a few scratches on the sides of the car... this was cause for nail-biting until the bill came earlier this week :).

One of the other Maru-a-Pula teachers brought her family the following day and we had an interesting time chatting with them and looking around the park with them... they have a lovely daughter who was just a delight to play with. One incident in particular was worth mentioning... we were lounging in deck chairs beside a tiny swimming pool all morning with a rhinocerous in the distance (a bit idyllic, actually) when our friend from MaP says "Guys, did you see the rhinocerous there?"

"Oh that one, he hasn't moved for hours"

"No, I don't think so. Look again!"

And there he was, a rather large black rhinocerous less than 10 meters from us (black rhinos are the aggressive, irritable sort), staring us right in the eye! We had no idea whether to move out of the way, stay very still, or just panic... but eventually some of the wardens came out and asked us to move around to the other side of the swimming pool--apparently all the rhino wanted was a drink of water! I'll post a picture of this soon, it's rather unbelievable unless you see it with your own eyes!

But other than a few nice meals, a rather ridiculous amount of time spent trying to boil water (my fellow camper was somewhat unexperienced with fire-building), and some wildlife in our campsite, nothing much happened. It was amazingly refreshing to get away from the MaP campus, though... even if it did take the majority of the next week to readjust to the school schedule.