Between goosebumps and oncoming traffic 🦁🚙

5:30 AM 

Meeting for the Early Morning Game Drive. Coffee, tea, and muffins to fend off sleep – and then one safari jeep after another arrives.

After a short drive, we reach Chobe National Park. There are even more cars waiting. Our guide tells us that between six and nine in the morning, 50 to 100 jeeps cruise through the savanna to show tourists – and also local school classes – as much of the wildlife as possible.

Maybe that’s why it’s called a Game Drive: the drivers communicate via radio and seem to see it as a personal challenge to spot the most exciting animals first. 😄

It’s certainly fun to be bundled up by the driver with blankets and rocked against the morning driving wind through the savanna.

And the drivers know their stuff. While hunting for the kings of the animals, the other residents are almost casually observed: giraffes, elephants, hippos 🦛😉, buffalo, jackals, monkeys, various species of antelopes, and plenty of birds.

The whole time I can’t help but think of the Serengeti Park in Lower Saxony. Back then, I had taken a jeep tour with my relatively small children and wondered why it had to be so dreadfully shaky.

Today I know: it really is like that in reality. 😂

We learn a lot. For example, according to our guide, hippos are responsible for particularly many deadly encounters with humans. Buffalos should definitely not be underestimated – they are called Widowmakers for a reason. And lions? They come after them in his ranking.

Along the way, we see skulls and bones of elephants and buffalos. Some fell prey to other animals, others died of natural causes. Meanwhile, large herds of puku antelopes pass through the landscape, and we spot kudus – so the lions are taken care of.

These three hours of driving through the savanna of Botswana are somehow overwhelming.

And still, I find myself grappling with a somewhat mixed feeling. So many jeeps driving through the national park in search of the next animals. I have to remind myself in between that the animals here have no fences and no boundaries and can escape the whole commotion at any time.

And someday the jeeps might also run on electricity … 🥴

Patient waiting and quiet animal watching – the kind of thing I had previously associated with “safari” – was certainly not on today’s agenda.

And yet, I am very glad that these national parks exist. And for the opportunity to see with my own eyes how here lives and interacts with each other.

Because only what we know, we can also protect.

And that will probably remain a balancing act: between tourism – yes, also ours 🥴 –, economic, and conservation interests.