Chobe River Cruise

Immediately after going on the Chobe National Park game drive we went on a Chobe River cruise. We were late getting off the game drive because we watched a leopard for an hour. Thebe River Safari was very flexible and waited for us to return to start the cruise. Because of this Richard, Brenda, and we had our own private cruise.

It was quite relaxing to be on the water and we were able to get amazingly close to the animals. The only animals we had to be very cautious about were the hippopotamus. They are very temperamental and aggressive. The cruise driver said that they have to flee from hippos more than any other animal. He also said that crocodiles in the water were hunting and also made him nervous. But, if they were out of the water sunning themselves they were not dangerous. We got very close to sunning crocodiles.

There is an island in the Chobe River that belongs to Botswana which is lush and green. There are a lot of animals on the island. We saw several there that we had not seen before. The Chobe River is the boundary between Botswana and Zambia.

The part of the cruise we liked the best was watching the elephants. Each day hundreds of them come down to the river and cross to the island. We would watch groups of them come down the hill. About halfway down the hill they would start to run to the water to get a drink. After a few minutes of drinking, one would start to cross to the island and the rest of the group would follow. You could see their pleasure at being in the water. Sometimes we could see them playing in the deep water like the picture of one elephant standing on another. The water was deep enough that they had to swim to get across. Once they were wet they often threw dirt on themselves to protect themselves from sun and bugs as you can see in the photo above. Notice how close the boats are to the elephants in one picture.

At the edge of the island was a section of water lilies. Our guide picked one and made a necklace for the women. He said that the natives used the stem from the water lily flowers as a drinking straw so they could stay further from the water to avoid crocodiles. He made the cruise very enjoyable and was very flexible to do whatever we wanted.