It was rather fresh when we woke up, but soon the warm sun reached us and we got going. While the others filled up water containers, I had to endure the “not-understanding” of the proof of payment and the vouchers which we had received from Bessie from the Footprints booking agency. I must admit it took a while for us to work it out ourselves, but I would have thought that they would be used to that type of document. In the end they fortunately gave up and asked me to let the person on duty at the Matswere main gate sort it our on our exiting. I could not agree more and quickly exited the office. At least we got two photostat copies of maps of Khutse. We were off.

The track was easy going and soon we arrived at our booked campsite. We did see one vehicle driving around, but all 10 of the Khutse Pan campsites which are arranged in a bit of a circle, were vacant. We were at Khutse Pan 6, which was not very level and the toilet was a bit far from the actual camping area - could be a problem if we had wild visitors! We had coffee at our site and then decided to explore Khutse. We had to be careful with our fuel, because we would not be able to fill up until Rakops or Maun many hundreds of kilometers away. We had even filled two brightly coloured jerrycans which were already empty and now adorned our little roof rack and made Troopy very visible! But Stephen and Paul calculated that we could risk a bit of exploration of Khutse. We took the southern track past Gwia Pan and drove through very attractive grassland. We did see a few gemsbok, a huge herd of springbok and a steenbokkie, but there was not so much game around. The grass was tall and we probably passed a lot of animals lurking in the lush growth. There were lots of birds to photograph and the juvenile Gabar goshawk had us puzzled for a while. There were Pale Chanting goshawk everywhere and we were becoming accustomed to the delightful din of the white browed sparrow weavers. Burchells Sandgrouse played kamikaze with us on the tracks and the Northern Black korhaan made us slow down very often. We realized that we probably should not risk driving all the way to the far Moreswe Pan and instead turned right at the junction to Molose waterhole. To our surprise there was a huge herd of elephant drinking at the waterhole, but it was almost impossible to photograph them into the direct sun. We also did not want to risk getting too close and decided to go and have lunch at one of the Molose campsites instead. After lunch we found a track that led to the other side of the waterhole. The herd of elephants was still there and now we had the sun behind us. It was a wonderful sight to see these majestic animals drink and see the little ones play, but soon they started to depart. We had been so lucky to catch the herd just in time and in perfect light. The herd disappeared into the African dust and now there were some ground squirrels appearing to amuse us.

It was time to return to our Khutse Pan campsite. We somehow did not follow the track that we had intended to be on and drove back on the track we intended to depart along the next day. We went to the Khutse waterhole. It would be a good place to visit the next morning. Giraffe came to drink and their reflection made our camera click away. There were hundreds of springbok in the distant background and some gemsbok were also enjoying their afternoon snack. All the Khutse Pan campsites were still vacant, but we decided to stick to No 6. We parked our Troopy in the track because it was difficult to find level places for two vehicles. Sunset was again marvellous and soon we had the fire going and enjoyed our first evening in the Central Kalahari (Khutse part).

Geschreven door Leartravels