Don't Touch the Animals! Travel with the Baysides: Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park

Another note on the Monamodi campsite-- I forgot to mention our murderous hornbill, local camp hooligan and killer of baby birds (I'll spare you the traumatizing details). This guy showed up several times, but luckily he wasn't too acclimatized to humans. He didn't approach or steal food (I'm sure he wanted to). Instead he stayed at a distance, unlike his cousins at previous camps where they were bold, demanding thieves that came straight to the table. The hornbills, though, are somewhat in my good graces because they eat scorpions. I also just secretly like them, even when they're bad.

The resident hornbill at Monamodi camp

After 4 days at Monamodi, we headed to our next campsite: Khiding. On our way there we took a detour and drove down to the Mpayathutlwa pan and watering hole. Just nearby in the grass at the edge of the pan, we saw this male lion. He blended in so completely, you would hardly know he was there. My picture doesn't show him very well. You'll just have to believe me, he's there in the middle, relaxing in the grass (there were a few grunts and huffs that gave him away, too, if we were ever in doubt he was there). We later camped within 500 meters of this spot. And some days later we saw a female lion here as well.

He really is in the grass!

The female lion we saw with part of the pan in the background

Our Khiding campsite was nice, but I wasn't crazy about its proximity to a second campsite that was right next door. Everywhere else in the park we had very isolated sites, usually kilometers away from anyone else. That said, it was still a nice campsite and yet another place where I could improve my shoveling skills. We also gave up our somewhat limited water supply at Monamodi (it was dependent on rains). At Khiding I got my first taste of washing dishes with only 2-3 cups of water and washing my hair with even less (I gave up hair washing). We conserved our water carefully and recycled it when we could (Need to rinse something? Here's the leftover dish water, honey.). It was a good lesson and we did it. We used so little each day that our water lasted throughout the rest of the trip. We only drained one of the two water tanks on the rig and we had enough water at the end for a reasonable shower our last afternoon in the park.

Khiding also had Syd. Syd was an annoyingly persistent squirrel that had obviously been fed by people many times before. Well, poor Syd wasn't getting anything from us. He'd run right up to our chairs and then sneak up to our chairs after we chased him away. Are there rabies in the Kalahari? I don't know and didn't want to find out. Syd was persistent though. Everyday the refrain was, "there's Syd again." Better or worse than a murderous hornbill? I don't know, but Syd was very cute and perky.

Relaxing under the A-frame at Khiding campsite (probably after chasing Syd away)

Just ignore the fact that I'm not wearing pants

After Khiding, we drove about 40 km to Bosobogolo where we camped for two days. I will forever think of Bosobogolo as the scorpion camp. It was an attractive site with a great view of the pan. It was sandy, windy, dry, hot, and did I say windy? It wasn't my favorite site, but our view of the pan was completely unobstructed and really spectacular. It was isolated and quiet. Nice. Why the scorpion camp? Well, let me tell you, you don't want to leave bags of firewood on the sand overnight. As we were loading in the morning, Richard was picking up bags of wood and putting them in back for our next site. I quickly pointed "scorpion!" two, three, four. All under the bags. They were small, but still. And then there was the big one that Richard spotted in the sand right at the base of our stepping stool at the back of the rig (that one got chopped with a shovel). We cleaned the back of the rig thoroughly at our next site because we had already thrown in a few bags of wood before we saw the scorpions underneath. No stings, the rig was clear and all was good. I did realize that the interesting jellyfish-like, almost iridescent hard thing I tapped with a stick (I was curious) at the Khiding camp was probably a scorpion, too. It looked identical to the big one that got chopped. And then the shovel, digging, squatting. Now I had new things to think about!