WE made such good time on our second attempt that, by the time we would normally have been thinking about pitching camp, we had already joined the main Francistown-Maun road.
So we decided to travel straight through to Maun.
Arriving late and tired at Crocodile Camp, we didn’t bother to pitch the tent, but just pulled out the awning and slept under that.
Saturday saw the start of a four-day public holiday and, by mid-afternoon, we had been joined by many Orapans to whom we had said goodbye the day before.
Much beer was swilled and Botswana’s independence was well and truly celebrated.
After the trials and tribulations of the previous few days, Corrie ‘unwound’ – to use a polite expression – and nearly grazed his nose on the bar floor. Luckily the rest of the party were all well on their way to doing the same sort of thing and nobody noticed.
After two days of riotous living, we left them to their binge and headed northwards. Apart from losing a case of beer overboard somewhere, we had no disasters all the way to Third Bridge.
And it really was ‘Third Bridge’ this time. The first two had been rebuilt. All the bridges in Moremi are made of Mophane trunks and branches, lashed together with number-8 wire.
They are a lot stronger than they look, but sometimes, if you touch a horizontal at a certain angle, it will turn slightly, like the bars of some cattle grids.
Corrie found this out the hard way within five minutes of our arrival. A log moved under his feet and he fell backwards, nearly impaling himself on a pointed upright.
Our poor little first aid kit was stretched to its limits to deal with this injury, so it was a very good thing that we had no further accidents requiring antiseptic and sterile gauze.
While I was still patching Corrie’s back, someone came past and told us that there were six lions about a kilometre further up the road. We didn’t bother to go and look, because we knew that the lions in this area were in the habit of wandering right through the camp.
We thought they would probably pay us a visit later. They didn’t. Neither did anything else. After our previous experiences at Third Bridge, we simply couldn’t understand it.
During the next couple of days we found out why things were so quiet. There seemed to be virtually no animals around.
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