Part 7 - Babs & Andy are on the road again and find fun in the game 'Don't Smash Your Oil Pan' (17th & 18th August 2018)

If you can call yourself a proud SIM card owner in Botswana, it doesn't mean you are considered capable of making phone calls. Equipped with our passports, we trudged into the provider store in the Town Center to have the cards activated. After about half an hour, they were functional, but we still needed to buy credit. So I go from counter 1 to counter 2, where I order the 2x50 Pula credits. The young lady gives me the receipt... with this I walk to counter 3. There I am handed the two scratch cards (sounds so important, but it was actually a rundown office). I hear the question: 'Do you have a coin to scratch?' I say: 'No, but I have fingernails.' And then I start scratching. It was a bit hard and I looked up to check if it was normal or if I should rub harder. Her silence made me interpret that I should press my nail harder into the plastic. I looked up again because the numbers did appear, but in a way that they couldn't be read anymore. 'Give me a coin...', she said, and I searched in Andy's wallet for a coin. The woman scratched with the coin on the scratch card... with the result that the revealed numbers disappeared more and more. 'You have to do that with the smallest coin', she said, and disappeared behind counter 4 to get one. 'Otherwise, you will ruin the card.' Yes, thanks for letting me know now.

We got the heavily scratched card activated at counter 5 (in another store) and so this odyssey was over.

On the road, I once again came across my new favorite dish 'Samp and Beans', and this time there was even meat with it. We had lunch together with locals who were taking a break, under the shade of a tree. We ate our portions out of a Styrofoam container with plastic forks, sitting at a plastic table and plastic chairs, and drank water from plastic bottles (for the sake of the environment... ^^).

Air Shakawe, the budget airline among the Okavango Scenic Flight providers, was waiting for our money, which we duly and timely brought before departure. All 5 fearless adventurers gathered in a mini-office opposite the mini-airport of Maun, who wanted to fly around the Okavango Delta with the company's mini-plane at an altitude of 150 meters.

As someone who is not exactly the most enthusiastic about flying, I just hoped that nothing would happen. A crash is bad enough. BUT to crash and survive AND be crushed by a crocodile... that is even worse.

Conclusion: It is worth every fear of flying and every Euro! Up there, you will encounter a play of colors of nature, animal landscapes from a perspective that an ordinary traveler simply doesn't have. Herds of elephants strolling through the endless expanse together with their young, hippos standing together in the delta and showing us their wide backs. Zebras, giraffes, buffalo and herds of antelopes... you name it. Breathtakingly beautiful.

Now we are chilling at the campsite of Gweta Lodge, preparing for tomorrow's tour to the salt pans (unfortunately, we cannot go there alone because our beloved Mr. VW Polo would break down on this route). Since we removed Moremi National Park from the to-do list (outrageously expensive), we will visit the salt pans instead... we will see the big animals in Chobe National Park. We have time.

The road to Gweta, or at least the first part of it, can best be described with the song: 'This path... will not be easy. This path is rocky and heavy.' Oh yes, that wasn't fun. For more than 1.5 hours, the driving pattern looked like this: 3rd gear, quick brake, 1st gear, slalom, pothole, mega pothole, slalom, 2nd gear, breaaak... stop, pothole on all sides, start, 2nd gear, full stop, 1st gear, slalom, .... you got it?

Always keep calm and drive carefully (animals? shade? potholes? bumps? sand? rocks? blinding sun?), because otherwise you will fall deep and the oil of your vehicle will seep into one of the holes. And now? The oil is where it should be, no warning lights are flashing on the dashboard, and the passengers are sitting in front of a cool beer. Cheers!

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