Day 21 – Chobe: When the Wonderful Becomes Ordinary

By the twenty-first day, something had happened to the way we looked at animals. Four game drives in South Luangwa had done it. Zebras, impala, the endless antelope: Lorena and I had started calling them, between ourselves, la paranza. In Italian, a paranza is the catch of small, cheap fish that comes up in a trawler’s net, the humble fry nobody makes a fuss over. That was what the plains game had become to us. We no longer raised the camera for them. We barely turned our heads.

So Chobe arrived, honestly, as “more animals.” A day trip across the border into Botswana, the fifth country of the journey, tacked onto the end of a trip that had already given us more wildlife than we knew how to hold. I went for the water safari, a different way of seeing, and because it was another country, though, unexpectedly, not the last one we would set foot in. I did not expect to be surprised. That is worth saying plainly, because it makes what happened later mean something.

A driver took us from Livingstone to the border in a car, then handed us over. At Kazungula you cross into Botswana over a bridge that only opened in 2021, replacing the old ferry that used to shuttle across the Zambezi. It is a strange, curved thing, its alignment deliberately bent to avoid the nearby borders of Namibia and Zimbabwe, and a single railway track runs down its centre, still unconnected, waiting for the proposed Mosetse–Kazungula–Livingstone railway. Even here, on the way to see elephants, the old dream of a continent stitched together by rail was sitting quietly under the tarmac.

This is the place where four countries almost meet: Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia, their borders converging in the braided channels of the river. It was the Namibia part that got Lorena. She had not pictured Namibia reaching this far east, and the idea of standing at a point where you could, in theory, look toward four nations at once stayed with her more than anything else at the crossing. A Botswana jeep came to collect us on the far side. Immigration, a change of guide, and we were in.

After Malawi and Zambia, Botswana felt to me more ordered, cleaner, calmer, and visibly wealthier: diamonds and high-end tourism underwrite the economy here, and something of that showed even through a car window. That is a traveller’s impression, formed at a border and at speed, not a ledger on three countries. But crossing after crossing, the journey south had felt like small steps up in ease and organisation, and Botswana sat at the far end of that feeling.

The morning game drive ran along the Chobe River, and it gave us exactly what I expected: the paranza. Herds of the animals we no longer looked at, browsing in the light. Botswana has the largest elephant population in Africa, and Chobe holds one of its densest concentrations, so the elephants were there too, in numbers that would have stopped me cold three weeks earlier. Now I noted them and moved on. The cameras stayed down.

I should confess something about how I behave in a group by this point in a trip. On a shared safari, the seats matter: the right position is the difference between a clean photograph and a head in the way. When I am with people I know, I trade and shuffle to make it fair. On a one-day trip with strangers, I did none of that. Lorena and I were hawks, without empathy or remorse, and we took the front seats on the jeep and, later, on the boat, leaving a honeymooning couple and a family behind us. The group was nine: the two of us, an American couple we had first met on the cruise, who had adopted us and insisted on photographing us as though we too were on honeymoon; a taciturn Belgian woman; and an Irish family from Galway, with whom we ended up talking about Gaelic football. That conversation, more than the border or the wealth or the herds, told me the trip was ending. It was a small, early homecoming, Galway turning up on the Chobe River.

There was a booking mix-up at lunch, and it fell in our favour. Through an operator error, the others were sent to a simple little restaurant while Lorena and I, paying exactly the same price, were seated at a luxurious hotel on the river. Lunch was the full spread: nshima, beef, chicken, local fish. I mention it because the same reflex that grabbed the front seats was at work here too, and I was not going to argue.

Then the afternoon, and the boat. We were on a small flat-bottomed craft, the outboard idling to nothing more than a burble. That is the whole point of a water safari: you drift, quietly, at the level of the water, and the animals read you not as a threat but as a piece of driftwood going by.

Partway through the cruise, the boat crossed to Impalila Island, the eastern tip of Namibia’s Zambezi Region, directly opposite Kasane. We stepped ashore at the small immigration post, had our passports checked, and walked onto the island through a landscape of villages and sandy paths that felt a world away from the safari boats on the river. It was only a brief visit, but it counted. Namibia had become the sixth African country of the journey, the one Lorena had struggled to place on the map that morning, now under our feet.

Back on the water, toward the Botswana bank, a large herd was finishing at the water, mothers nudging their calves up out of the mud, and a few metres off a huge hippo sat half-submerged, snorting, put out by the commotion. The guide cut the motor. We drifted, maybe twenty metres off the bank, for ten minutes. Nothing moved. The flat calm of an African late afternoon.

Then, two metres off the bow, the water broke. No splash, no sound. Just a dark mass coming up out of the river. For a held breath, every one of us thought crocodile. It was a bull elephant. A solitary male, swimming the channel toward the far bank, and when an elephant swims it is almost entirely underwater: all we had seen was the crown of the skull, like a grey rock, and the trunk held straight up out of the surface, a snorkel. He seemed not to have seen us. He surfaced walking on the shallow bottom just as the boat drifted toward him, and he stopped. He turned his head. Water ran off his tusks.

Then he blew, hard, a blast that carried a fine spray of river water across the boat and left us wet. It did not feel like a charge. If anything, it read like being put on notice, an animal letting us know it had clocked us. He shook his ears, walked on through the mud, passed the bow by a couple of metres, and climbed the opposite bank, leaving behind only bubbles and a line of footprints filling with water.

Nobody spoke for a full minute. We sat there wet with Chobe water, cameras in our hands, and not one of us had thought to use them. The people who had spent three weeks lowering the camera at the paranza, and photographing everything else on reflex, had just watched a bull elephant surface an arm’s length away and had not taken a single frame. That is the thing I came away with. You can travel long enough that wonder wears down into routine, until zebras are cheap fish and a hundred thousand elephants are scenery. And then the river opens two metres from your face and undoes all of it in a second.

We came back to Livingstone in the evening. That night we ate at the hostel, and after weeks of African food, lunch’s nshima and beef and fish still sitting heavy, I ordered, with only mild guilt, a chicken schnitzel and chips.

Practical Notes

What I did

Chobe day trip with Zambezi Tours & Safaris, booked through GetYourGuide.
What I paid: €309.84 for two people.
What’s included: road transfer to and from the Kazungula border, the border crossing, a Botswana guide, a morning game drive, a buffet lunch (drinks excluded), refreshments during the activities, and a three-hour afternoon boat cruise on the Chobe River.
My take: If you have already done several land drives elsewhere, the reason to come is the water safari. Seeing elephants, hippos and crocodiles from the river is a genuinely different experience from the jeep. Go for the boat.

Getting there

A driver takes you from Livingstone to the Kazungula border on the Zambian side; a jeep collects you once you are through immigration. Kazungula is a full international border, so carry your passport and allow time on both sides. The Kazungula Bridge (opened 2021) replaced the old ferry and sits beside the point where the borders of Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia converge.

Where I stayed

Jollyboys, Livingstone, our base for this stretch (see Day 18 for the accommodation note).