Limpopo River Lodge, Botswana

It is incredibly difficult to describe the atmosphere around this lodge. I literally mean its in the middle of no where. A four hour drive down a dirt road and then there it is. Right on the water of the Limpopo river. There were only a handful of lodges and I only saw one other person apart from the staff. The staff were amazing though. Doing the dishes in the early hours, starting fires, etc and yet you hardly ever saw them. When we did see them they were always cheerful and always laughing. It felt like a 5 start resort that we had all to ourselves.



Over the next 2 nights we did two game drives seeing all sorts of animals in the wild such as Kudu, waterbok, warthogs, many species of birds, laguans, monkeys and much much more. We were told stories by DJ and Kelly of their encounter with the elephants on their previous trip. They were charged by a mother elephant after they got between the mother and her baby and went flying down the road in reverse until the elephant gave up and turned around. Scary I am sure but part of me really wanted to see the elephants.




We relaxed a lot by the river, tanning in the sun, swimming in the pool, and catching up on a few books. At one point Kelly, my mum, and me decided it was a good idea to try and hop across the rocks to get to the other side of the Limpopo and see if we could enter South Africa this way. It was decided that the chance of crocodiles been in the river were slim to none so we set off to the other side.

We made it over we great ease and started walking up to barbed wire fence that acts as the boarder into the South Africa. We were currently in no mans land as the Limpopo is the boarder of Botswana. As we approached the fence a Springbok (or something alone those lines) jumped out from the side and ran across our path giving us all quite a scare. With that we decided to turn around as next time it might be a leopard or lion.

Other highlights of this trip was do a little off road 4x4 trips down dried up river beds and driving to a huge hollowed out baobab tree. I have never seen a tree quite like it and suggest searching one out if you are ever in Africa. Its quite a remarkable site.

On the last night as we were driving back from the last game drive it was getting a bit late and we decided not to stop to see animals unless it was something really big. About 5min later there they were about 30ft away. 3 huge elephants eating from the tress. Wow. I was just in awe of these animals. I was unable to get a photo as they sort of disappeared into the bush but I was just so excited to have seen a animal like this in the wild in its true habit. That night we had yet another brilliant meal (as we did every night in Africa) and sat around the fire talking and taking a few pictures of the sunset. There really are no other sunsets quite like an African Sunset. At least not that I have come across yet.