Day 20

We had more than 600 km ahead of us, while we had an appointment for another “game cruise” at 15.15 at Thebe river near Chobe NP. This resulted in our alarm being set at 4.45, but as our guide had repeatedly pointed out to us, this was an adventure (hence the adventure dust), not a vacation, so we just had to suck it up, no sympathy there (and granted, we would continue to sleep in the truck, while the poor guy had to drive those difficult roads again in the heat). The good thing about this morning was that we knew it was the last time we had to break up camp ourselves and because it was ridiculously early for everybody it was relatively quiet as well. All in all I would have made a small dance had it not been that early.
We had been told that we would cross another mouth-and-foot disease check point. This meant that the truck would have to drive through some chemical bath, while we would all have to walk over a dirty rag with the same chemicals. Technically, the soles of all our shoes had to touch the rag and if the officials there would get suspicious they could make us take all our luggage out so that they could check for illicit shoes. To keep things practical, we were told to all bring one pair in addition to the pair we were wearing and also rub that additional pair on the rag. The theory being that it would not seem reasonable that we would be on a trip like this with only one pair of shoes, so not having an additional pair would for sure be suspicious, but if everybody would have two pairs of shoes it was likely to satisfy the officials, which luckily it was.
It was a very warm quite early on and the road was quite poor as well, making it difficult for us to sleep on the truck. But again there was the added advantage of everybody being worn down and quiet. Luckily we made it to our campsite around 2 and after putting up our tents (also for the last time), we went to the docks. There were many tourists on the river, probably because there were many animals to be seen from the water and most of them allowed us to come very close. Temperatures were more comfortable on the water, which negatively impacted the quiet on our boat. At some point one of our group members even asked the ranger “we are not quiet, why don’t the animals move away?”. I could not help but mumbling “no shit”, but unfortunately this did not lead to any introspection or a realization that the animals that we saw were (clearly) not bothered by this, but that we might be missing out on something else that was bothered by it.