The 29th of August we leave for a safaritrip to Botswana. For Henk it is the first time in souther africa, for Rose a come back after 8 years. We have a direct flight from Amsterdam to Joburg and we stay there in the Drifter's Inn.  In the afternoon Ken from Drifter's tells us some details about out journey. There we meet our 10 fellow travelers (The travelers). (After Maun 4 extra travelers will join us).

Sunday morning there is an early wake-up call around 05:00! At 06:30 we leave in a rather large truck  for a long journey to NataLodge in Botswana. Our driver's name is Gustaaf. A very silent South-African. We have to travel a distance of around 850 K. Our first stop is after two hour . The border and our lunchbreak are three hours later . We were warned that there would be long waiting times at the border but all went quickly and without problems. We drive on to Francistown for a third stop. . Although the road is rather bumpy we all fall asleep.The landscape is dull and the monotone sound of the engine has a hypnotising effect. The first two zebra's Rose sees are not considered special by her. She thought it was a TV-movie! The other animals we see are mostly cows, goats and donkey's, and sometimes a baboon, zebra or a warthog ('wrattenzwijn' in Dutch, 'vlakvarkie' (=flatpig) in Afrikaans).

At 18:30 we are at NataLodge atlast!  We meet out two guides (Anthony and girlfriend Vanessa). We put our gear in the tents and go for the BBQ.

Next day we recover from the long journey. We get more acquinted with eachother and are learning the names. ‘Ger‘ is almoust impronounceble for the english so we propose 'Rose' as an alternative. Anthony tells us how to set up the tents and how to put them down again. We stay at the pool until 15:00. We watch the birds , read for a while  and have a swim & shower . Then we leave for the saltpan.