DREAMING OF PLACES ONCE VISITED – SOUTHERN AFRICA

Continuing our series of dreaming about those places we have enjoyed traveling to and have had wonderful experiences on – you can’t leave out Africa! Here’s the report of our Southern Africa tour from 2018.
The Big 5 on Safari, 4 countries, 3 Cessna flights over deserts and deltas – this is a special tour with plenty to wow about! We started off in Namibia, a desert country, famous for its diamonds. Windhoek, the capital, provided a new golf course, Omeya, for our first round, before we set out to Etosha for our many sightings of the variety of wildlife found there. Within the first two hours, we had our first glimpses of three lions sitting in the Savannah. Onward to the coast and our next round of golf at Rossmund, one of just five registered golf courses in the desert. To see the course from the air was memorable – sand everywhere apart from 18 strips of green! Next, we flew over the Skeleton Coast and into the sand dunes to Sossusvlei, just outside the Dunes National Park. An early start next morning saw us witnessing the sunrise over spectacular sand dunes and more than you can imagine, with the shadows accentuating their perfect forms that are being constantly reshaped by the winds. We then moved onto Botswana via Windhoek (and a further round of golf at the Country Club) and to the Okavango Delta. We landed in our Cessna Caravan at an airstrip in the middle of nowhere to be met by an old Botswana army truck that transported us to our tented camp for a couple of nights. A sunset cruise on the adjacent lake, and a Mokoro trip, a dug out canoe punted by locals skilled at punting, filled our time here. Onward, and another flight took us to Chobe, where a sunset cruise gave us the opportunity to see much wildlife, including swimming Elephants, Crocodiles and Hippos. The next morning’s early game drive presented us with a Leopard sighting and a Pride of Lions, with four cubs in tow, complete with the proud alpha male. We couldn’t have wished for more. Here we also played our fourth round of golf, sharing the course with Springbok, Warthogs and Impalas. Next, we moved across the border into Zimbabwe and to Victoria Falls. The falls were raging, with huge volumes of water pouring down into the abyss. Elephant Hills, on the banks of the Zambesi river, was our next course to play and the resident wildlife seemed almost normal by now. You were allowed to clean and place your ball if it had sunk into the dried Hippo footprints, thankfully! Another flight and coach journey from Jo’burg took us to the last stop of the trip, Sun City, a larger than life resort hosting four hotels, a casino and two Gary Player designed golf courses. These were the best courses of the trip, both in design and condition – most of us lost a fair amount of balls at Lost City and a few on the Gary Player course, but the two rounds were a great way of wrapping up a fantastic tour with a great bunch of people.