Botswana and “The Elephant Highway”

Arriving in Botswana involves taking a small ferry from Zambia into Botswana. The ferry is only about 500m and there is an island half way across which has a point which is on four borders, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. This is also a bottleneck for all of the semi trucks that are transporting things across Africa, as only one truck will fit on each ferry and there was only two truck ferries and one people/car ferry. The trucks were lined up for miles on either side of the “border”. Botswana has a lot of kilometers waiting for us. Although this section is mainly flat and straight, we are making up for our shorter dirt days in this section through our “century week” where we do 160 + kilometers everyday… Next week we will do our 207km day (our longest day on tour). Yesterday we went into Chobe National Park on a River Safari. We were on the Chobe river which is a tributary to the Zambezi river which is the river that feeds Victoria Falls. We saw a tonne of hippos and large lizards and even a lion that was chasing a warthog and then the lion came down really close to the river. I thought that this safari was much better than the truck safari because I didn’t feel so crammed in.

The Elephant Highway is in an area which has thousands of wild elephants. They are extremely dangerous animals and we have been advised that if we see elephants on the side of the road we need to stop and wait for the elephant to pass by or move very carefully past the elephant. Most of the day today was just long and there were no animals but just a lot of elephant poo. Later this afternoon, just before camp there was an elephant. I was glad that I ran into a couple of other riders so that I wasn’t close to the elephant on my own. We waited for awhile until the elephant would pass, but he was pretty content to just be hanging out on the side. We finally decided to bike pass the elephant. It made me really nervous like when I used to be nervous around bears before I lived in Alaska for awhile. The elephant defiantly took a look at us as we passed by, but we made it by safely. You have to look closely in the photo to see the elephant in the distance... At camp tonight at our bush camp everyone was trying to set up their tents off of the elephant pathways just in case they tromp through our camp at night…

We have three more long days until our rest day in Maun. 154km, 182km, and 136km. We are now at less than a month count down… My legs are very tired and I feel like I am in overtraining mode… But with only a few weeks left I feel like I can persevere.