July 7

July 7
ROGER:
Travis and I removed the shock in the morning and did our regular maintenance of filling the transfer case with gear oil. We have had a leak since we left and have had to keep filling it with oil regularly – today it was my turn to get dirty. Removing the shock went smoothly – thankfully I brought a basic tool kit along. If only I had my welder to also fix the shock bracket!
Roger
TRAVIS:
As we were sitting around the campfire tonight, just after finishing up our evening meal of Potjie, Renae all of a sudden yelled “there’s a hyena!” We all looked, and sure enough, there was a hyena by the front of our tent, just about to sink its big, ugly teeth into our cooler full of food. I immediately grabbed the large stick I was sitting on and raced towards the hyena (who I will henceforth refer to as “Jerko”) along with the rest of the family, yelling loudly in hopes that we could scare the living bejeezus out of the thing and get it to leave without all of our food. We must not be quite as scary as we thought we were, because Jerko proceeded to grab the cooler in its huge jaws and carry it off so quickly that we couldn’t even really see where it went. While we shone the flashlights all around and marveled at the strength of the beast (the cooler was hard for one person to lift up into the truck by themselves), Jerko was somewhere enjoying the hamburger and whole chicken that we hadn’t yet eaten, along with all kinds of other goodies. We basically gave the cooler and its goods up for lost, and began weighing our losses. Dad, however, noticed a water trail from the cooler’s drain, which had been opened, and followed the trail a little way down the road, where off in the bushes he saw the eyes of the hyena as it chomped on its booty. He booked it back to the camp, yelling at us to jump in the Land Rover, and we took off towards the hyena. We drove into the bushes where Dad had seen it, and saw Jerko standing guard over the opened cooler next to food and ripped wrappers scattered all over the ground. It was a brave beast, but when I revved Tau’s engine and headed for it, he scampered into the bushes. Dad got out to retrieve the cooler and what was left of the goodies, while I charged towards Jerko with Tau every time he lurked around the bush and tried to come back for the food. Dad (moving as quickly as is possible for a man of his size) shoved all the food into the cooler, threw the cooler into the back of the Rover, and jumped in again. Hyenas can be pretty vicious, and apparently (according to Lonely Planet) some of them killed a young boy at this same campsite in 2000, so we were pretty wary of Jerko. Anyway, that was our excitement for the day. Other than that, today we moved from our makeshift campsite right outside the gate of Chobe to the campsite we are staying at tonight in Moremi National Park. The road into Moremi was beautiful, and we saw a lot of wildlife as we followed along the banks of the Khwaii (sp?) river. We spent a while watching some hippo antics by the river and raving over the cute little hippo babies. After we got into Moremi, we headed towards Dead Tree Island, where a pride of lions had recently been seen, and spent quite a while trying to find it. When we finally got there, there was a lion and a lioness lazing around in the shade and generally being boring. It was pretty cool, but we had been hoping for the whole pride. Oh well. Then it was getting late and we rushed towards our campsite, barely making it through several little muddy/marshy/pondy areas and having to turn around where the road went into some larger pools. Tensions ran a little high at the road conditions and at not knowing exactly where we were (we kids and dad were loving it), but we finally pulled into our campground a few minutes before dark. Another good day in the bush.
Travis
RENAE:
And now we have teeth marks in our cooler for a souvenir.