Kubu Island Adventure, April 2010
We recently had one of our self drive guided tours to Kubu Island in Botswana, they have had an immense amount of rain up in Botswana recently and this made the trip even more exiting! Our first night was spent at Kwa Nokeng Lodge and the plan was to travel to Planet Baobab the next day. All went according to plan up to this point. We camped at Planet Baobab and it rained heavily the whole night, the next morning we packed up and headed out to Kubu Island on the north to south route across the Makgadikgadi pans, entering at the little town of Gweta. After about 20kms of driving through the bush we stopped for lunch and then we got our first views of the pans, this is what we saw!
The pan looked more like the sea in Zanzibar! We walked out onto the pan and the surface under the water was as hard as concrete, so we decided to proceed, we made it about 5km into the pan and then we hit thick mud! The Nissan Nivara that was one of the vehicles in our group started to wheel spin and bogged down, I tried to recover it using our Land Rover but it to got bogged down, after many hours of digging and jacking it was decided that we should set up camp on a nearby island, which we named Easter Island, because it was Easter Day! We had a fantastic braai that night, and did some star gazing as the clouds were finally shifting off. The next morning we carried on trying to get the vehicles unstuck, after about 3 hours we had moved the land Rover about 2 meters and was just about to free it when along came a Land Cruiser with a winch, we hooked up the Nivara to the winch and it was out like a shot! Once the 4×4′s were out it was decided that we should abandon our plans to get to Kubu Island as the driver of the Land Cruiser told us there were about 10 more 4×4′s stuck in mud near the Island. We decided to head back to Gweta and we stayed the remaining days at Gweta Lodge which was fantastic!
Although we didn’t make it to our planned destination, this was a true South African Adventure, and a great time was had by all of us!
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This was an amazing trip, action packed from start to finish! Would do it again.
Timmo was a great guide and very knowledgeable on animals, birds and Botswana in general. When times were hard (stuck on the pans) he kept his cool at all times. This makes a good guide.
Thanks!
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The pictures look amazing
Sure does make the pans look like the ocean…
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