If you have landed here, it’s either because I’ve bored you rigid about photography and foisted the link on you directly, or you’ve googled something obscure like ‘Botswana and Tatooine’ and are wondering what goggles to pack for your own trip.

The TL;DR version: no matter how long you are staying, pack for about 3 days. Assuming you don’t fancy 40 degrees Celcius in the shade and are going in winter, take a wind-proof coat, a warm hat, and something to cover your nose and mouth. Maybe not goggles though: the lions will assume you’re an idiot and bite your head off.

Packing and Clothes

Packing for this trip turned out to be something of an art form. As most of the camps in the Okavango Delta are very remote you will likely need to travel by light aircraft, which imposes a 20kg total luggage limit; the bags also have to be soft, so no wheelie cases. If the planes are busy (ours weren’t), you can look forward to being weighed with your bags. I’m not entirely sure what happens if you exceed a limit on a busy flight. Maybe you have to travel on your own when you’re thinner.

My camera bag weighed 7kg, which left me with a bit of a struggle to pack everything else in.

I bought a 50 litre holdall which turned out to be a little small, coming in at 9kg fully packed, with enough spare capacity to buy a postcard or a nice sheet of A4. I really regretted not taking a GoreTex shell that I didn’t have room for. The temperature for the morning drives was around 10 degrees Celcius, which started to feel pretty bloody cold after half an hour: while my clothes were warm enough, they weren’t wind-proof. The jeeps at different camps were kitted out with a variety of blankets, fleecy ponchos (if you’ve gotten past the part where you might get weighed in front of the pilot and the other passengers, you can see that these trips don’t really cater for your vanity) and blankets. I took a peaked cap, but could have done with something warmer. I also missed the part where our travel agent recommended taking lip balm. I expect my lips will grow back at some point.

All of the camps we stayed at do laundry to accommodate the luggage limitations; you may need to wash your smalls though. I guess close encounters with apex predators might have some unintended consequences in that department. It’s a weird thing to get your head around, but you probably only need to pack for about 3 days, regardless of how long you’re staying.

Now we get on to the juicy part: what to wear.

Oh. My. God.

Lots people were dressed like… Let’s say a paratrooper crossed with Crocodile Dundee – except that they were mainly in their 60s and and from Surrey. I admit that I packed what I jokingly call my high performance trousers, a pair of middle-age affirming Rohans that I bought nearly 20 years ago. These have been quite useful for other trips down the years as they are fast drying (or what the Rohan blurb would probably call something like ‘UV activated surfactant wicking’, under a picture of someone rugged pointing meaningfully at the horizon). For this holiday, the most active we got was climbing into the jeeps. If your trousers need to be fast drying, it’s most likely because you spilled some white wine on them.

None of the big cats can see in colour [well, they have very limited colour perception], so wearing your army issue greens and browns is largely pointless. I asked two of our guides about this separately and they both agreed. One, a former soldier, joked about having to take cover. If your last line of defence is pattern dispersal, you’re screwed. The only rule is ‘not very bright’: if you are shuffling around in the jeep in your disco shirt, it may break the illusion that the vehicle is a single entity which the cat will ignore. Other colours may have a bearing on insects: wearing black will obviously make you sweat like one of these:

The final packing observation is about dust. The delta is in the Kalahari Basin so everything that isn’t wet is covered in a very fine sand, and it gets everywhere. We saw a few people wearing the sort of masks you see cycle couriers wearing. I saw one person who was wearing a mask, untinted skiing goggles, a hat and a scarf wrapped over everything. If you can imagine a Tusken Raider with an expensive jacket and a Nikon… I ended up improvising with one of my wife’s scarves. The dust is quite abrasive: I’ve noticed that Touch ID on my iPhone has stopped recognising my thumb print on my right hand, which has worn down to nothing. It’s probably not very good for you over the long term.

Kit: Wins and Fails

I brought two lenses: a 24-105L and my 100-400L. I also took my 1.4x extender, which I used for a couple of bird shots and the aard-animals (which I’ll come back to), which we couldn’t get close to. Having to focus manually with it is a pain in the arse. I could have left the walkabout lens at home. My wife’s OnePlus has a fantastic camera, and I was conscious of getting dust on the sensor with changing lenses. I’m going to get my camera body serviced at some point over the summer. I must have taken it in and out of my bag hundreds of times over the course of the holiday to try to minimise the dust exposure, but it’s got to have been affected by it.

One piece of kit that served me particularly well was a pair of noise cancelling Bose earphones which I’d researched, and bought in Duty Free on the way out – QuietComfort 20s. They were fantastic for the flights (particularly the small planes). The camps we stayed in were universally noisy at night – both wildlife and, at Kanana, some sort of generator or water heater. I’m a light sleeper so they were a godsend.

The biggest fail was inconsequential but amusing: my FitBit. With the shaking around on game drives I got credited with tens of thousands of steps that I didn’t take. On one record breaking day that I barely walked the length of myself I apparently clocked up 29k.

Masuwe Camp, Zimbabwe

We flew into Jo’burg with Virgin Atlantic, our first time on a 787. I was particularly taken with the button to tint the windows instead of having an old school sliding shutter. It also managed to land in ‘mist’ (which in this case is a euphemism for ‘fog’): we were told we were making a ‘special landing’ (that got our attention!), which required us to turn off all electronic equipment, including kit already in flight mode. The continuing mist then caused a 3 hour delay to our hop to Vic Falls airport in Zimbabwe. The queuing for visas there was farcical: you really need to know in advance what you want [we needed a Kaza visa for Zambia] and it was fairly apparent that most people didn’t.

Our guide picked us up and drove us to Masuwe Camp. We were the only guests there for the two nights we stayed, and it was fantastic. We dumped our bags and went straight out on a game drive, where we saw some elands (massive antelopes) which are a little uncommon, and then came back for dinner. I think the chef was bored: he really pushed the boat out.

The reason the video above is quite grainy is because it was sunset, which is way past my long lens’ bedtime.

The camp has an artificial water hole which attracts a range of animals (mainly elephants and buffalo). It was good fun sitting up on the balcony watching the passing traffic.

No cats though. We had a couple of raiding parties: vervets. Our first morning, they stole the jam from our table and, on the second, the toast. On the latter occasion I tried shooing the thing off with my napkin. It paused for a heartbeat and mentally went ‘yeah, right’, and ignored me, picking up the slices it had knocked onto the ground one at a time. I know from previous holidays that they’re dangerous, so I was pretty half-hearted about it.

We did wonder if they saved any of the jam from the morning before…

All of the camps we stayed in had a policy of accompanying the guests to their rooms after sundown. I initially thought this was a bit of theatre, up until the point on the first night when we couldn’t get back to our room because a buffalo decided to come and have a drink from the swimming pool.

On our first full day we had a trip to the falls (which were breathtaking), which we followed with a walk across the border for an hour in Zambia. One of the guys in work (Andre) has been to 120 countries, so I’m determined to clock up as many as we can! Anyway, apart from a fantastic view of the falls from a bridge on the other side of the border, it was a bit sketchy: a very hard sell from a couple of hawkers who walked with us for about 5 minutes. It was just the right side of threatening.

We rounded off our last full day in Zimbabwe with a pleasant enough – by which I mean boozy – boat trip on the Zambezi. Wildlife-wise it was a mix of hippos and birds.

Chobe Elephant Lodge, Botswana

We had a short drive across the border, via Kasane airport, to our next lodge which was just outside the Chobe national park. The routine there was the same for the rest of the holiday: up before 6; breakfast at half past; out for the first drive; back for about 11:30; lunch at midday; break until 3 (because it’s hot enough even at this time of the year to reduce the animal activity); ‘high tea’, and then out for the second drive or boat trip.

We had our first lion encounters in Chobe, which was fascinating. We also had an obscured view of them munching on something unlucky on our second day. Towards the end of our stay we had a pretty interesting boat trip, the highlight of which was watching a small herd of elephants crossing the Chobe river.

This cracked us up: it’s a group of young elephants ‘head-waggling’: our guide said that when they are this young they have trouble controlling their heads because of how heavy they are. I’ve subsequently googled it and there may be other explanations…

…regardless, it reminded me of this:

Okuti Camp, Botswana

After 3 nights in Chobe we had our first light aircraft transfer to the Delta. It was 55 minutes of sheer hell. My wife loved it. As a fairly nervous passenger at the best of times, I found that by the third one I’d got a bit more used to them, but I’ll never get to a point where I enjoy them.

The Okuti camp was absolutely stunning. We ended up staying in a family unit – basically a permanent tent-like structure, with a balcony looking onto a lagoon. We’ve been lucky enough to stay at some pretty fancy places down the years, and Okuti was right up there with the best of them.

The staff were amazing. On our last night, we were surprised with a private dining experience – they had set up a table on one of the remote parts of the raised walkway around the camp, surrounded in candles – to celebrate a significant birthday my wife had a few months back. We hadn’t mentioned it, so it must have been passed on by our travel company. It was a really nice touch. So we ate our fantastic meal and drank champagne, listening to hippos grumbling and vaguely wondering if it was safe.

Kanana Camp, Botswana

Our last two nights were in Kanana, via a 25 minute flight on a 5 seater Cessna. That suffered from the strangest turbulence I’ve ever encountered. Imagine sitting in an old mini, which is suspended – and swinging wildly from – a rope, but 4.5k feet in the air. Once again, my wife loved it.

The nutter.

Kanana is in a private concession. This was a new one on me: it means the guides are allowed to drive off-road. The animals are still completely free to wander: the only fences are there to try to keep the larger creatures out of the camp.

The already-impressive game moved up a notch at this place.

This is one of my favourite photos from the trip:

The Aard-animals

I’m going to include a couple of shots that aren’t great, but which are of animals that are less common to see. First up we have the aardwolves, having an intimate moment in a not particularly intimate location (i.e., in plain sight):

I’d never heard of these before – I think they look a bit like a science project that went a bit wrong. We were quite a long way from the loving couple. With the 1.4x extender, I’ve found that adjusting the focus while holding the shutter release down (firing off about half a dozen shots) generally gives some reasonable results. It’s not pin-sharp, but it’s the best I got.

Next up we have an aardvark:

The sun was going down when I took this so I really pushed the ISO. I jammed the camera into the arm rest on the jeep to keep it steady for the slow shutter. It’s ok, and about as good as I could have hoped for. They are odd looking spuds, got to be said.

…And home again

The trip home was a slog. A 25 minute flight – which my wife sat in the co-pilot’s seat for – on a light aircraft, which took us to Maun. From there we got on a reassuringly large SA Airways flight back to Jo’burg. That flight was notable for having the most bizarre food we’ve had since our fruit salad with prawns on an internal flight in Vietnam 10 years ago. I had cold meatballs, served with what appeared to be minced up pasta mixed with coleslaw.

Yum.

The flight from Jo’burg was long but uneventful. And so we are back in the startlingly grey Blighty, fatter than when we left, and talking about nothing except the wildlife, the hospitality and the downright fabulousness of Botswana.

I’ll add a few more pics and videos when I get round to it.

Mantrap

Fancy bed

baobab

Hubbard’s  sportive lemur

Sifaka

Sifaka with infant

Grumpy common brown lemur

Flower bug

Ring-tailed lemur

Isalo

On our last evening in Isalo, I was sitting outside the room when I noticed these weird shaped motes floating in the air. Given the recent experience with the flower bugs, I assumed that they were some sort of whacky insect, until one of them landed on me and I touched it with my finger:

Slash and burn

It’s hardly the most fascinating picture but it was quite a poignant one for me: it’s a piece of ash. ‘Slash and burn’ is a common agricultural technique in the country. We were told a fire got out of control a few years ago: it affected 60% of the Isalo park and killed all but two of the sifakas. You see a lot of fires as you are driving through the countryside.

We visited one other smaller reserve before we moved on, called Zombitse. It was ok: plenty of ring-tailed lemurs and chameleons in the mix but by this stage, unless the lemurs were species we hadn’t seen before or were doing handstands, it was time to move on. Despite the name, there were no zombies.

We had a long drive to our next venue, which was the Ranomafana national park and the Setam Lodge. We passed this along the way. I love this shot, which is pretty much straight out of the camera:

The sky from the start of the Simpsons

The change in the weather over the course of the day reflected our move out of the arid region and into rainforest. We had a very interesting night walk on the first evening with the highlight being a mouse lemur:

Mouse lemur

The guide got a banana and smeared it over the branch [which is the brown slimy stuff you can see in the shot]. You then hope that the smell attracts a lemur. It took a couple of goes as the first fishing expedition attracted a rat. Being Madagascar, you half expect the rats to have, I don’t know, wings and a handlebar moustache at the very least. Nope: they have plain old rats, just like everywhere else.

Anyway, the mouse lemurs are lightning fast: they run along the branch hoovering up the banana as they go. They are ridiculously cute. These and the bamboo lemurs look like the result of a conversation between a toddler and a cartoonist.

“Bigger eyes.”

“No problem.”

This is a baby long-nosed chameleon. It’s not a great shot but the conditions were pretty difficult: macro depth of field, at night, with the 2 inch long subject on a branch that was moving…

Baby long-nosed chameleon

The next day we had our physically toughest hike, which was about 8km over very hilly ground. Just on that point, in our experience I’d say it’s second only to Borneo, in terms of the physical demands of getting around in rainforest. That said, the temperature we had last week was low- to mid 20s. If you were covering the ground that we did in Ranomafana at the height of the summer, you’d have a real slog on your hands.

Ring-tailed mongoose

Golden bamboo lemur

Flat-tailed gecko

From Ranomafana we had another long drive to our final venue, which was the Eulophiella Lodge, next to the Andasibe national park. We broke the journey with an overnight stay in a guesthouse called the Maison Tanimanga in Antsirabe. That was notable for what I rated as the best meal of the holiday.

A quick aside about the grub before I get on to Andasibe. It’s French influenced, with every place we stayed in serving baguettes and croissants for breakfast.

• Tulear had pretty decent food, but with the odd ‘miss’: like a zebu carpaccio starter which was frozen.
• Relais de la Reine: very rich food, with lots of creamy sauces.
• Setam Lodge: I’ve no idea. I was in full-on emergency mode and had boiled rice and vegetables for the entirety.
• Maison Tanimanga: fabulous home-cooked French food.
• Eulophiella: slightly simpler fare but still very nice.

Andasibe was the coldest of the places that we stayed, with the temperature down to 11C at night. I enjoyed this park the best, I think: it was slightly easier going and there was a fantastic variety of wildlife.

Velvet amity [I think]

Indri

Diademed sifaka

Nightjar [breeding pair – sleeping]

Golden bamboo lemur

Black and white ruffed lemur, and me. I’m on the right.

So that was our fortnight in Madagascar, and it really is an extraordinary place. You’ve got to hand it to that Attenborough fella: he really knows his onions.

We got back from a fortnight in Belize on Sunday afternoon. It was, by my reckoning, the 38th country we’ve visited, on a trip we worked on with a well known UK long haul travel specialist. I say ‘we’: my wife did all the organising. I had almost no idea where I was going – this was a matter of choice, I hasten to add.

By the numbers:
– Photos taken: 580.
– Of which, keepers: 4.
– Wildlife encounters of the “you’ve got to be kidding” variety: 1.
– Arrests: 1.

A warning in advance: we had a scene play out on the way to the famous ATM Cave which was rather unsavoury, and which I can neither window dress [for reasons that will become very clear] nor skip, by virtue of being a significant talking point for a day or two for us. You might want to come back to this if you are having your lunch.

The default offering from the travel company is to fly in via Miami, which an overnight stay. That felt like a waste of time, so we asked if we could fly in via Mexico instead, as we’d be able to stay ‘air-side’ when we were transiting. This isn’t actually right, and made for a pretty tense return leg [which I’ll come back to]. Our agent also screwed up the booking and couldn’t get us on to the Cancun flight to Belize City, so we ended up having to stay in a Marriot just outside the airport anyway. This meant we’d have a pretty long drive to the Belize border on the first full day. In short, travelling via Mexico gained us nothing: if you’re thinking of travelling from the UK, just take the simple option and come in via Miami. Cancun airport is massive, and we had a chaotic 90 minute wait to get our bags. The refried beans we had at breakfast were fantastic but hardly enough to swing it.

We were dropped at the border and walked across the timezone [a first] and through passport control into Belize, sharing the queue with people who seemed to be taking little apart from vast quantities of toilet roll into the country. A short drive and boat journey later and we were at our first destination and highlight of the holiday, the Lamanai Outpost Lodge. Great food, lots of interesting things to do, great wildlife guides, and a really nice atmosphere: we couldn’t rate it highly enough. We were there for 3 nights, and had a nice mix of activities: a couple of wildlife spotting walks, a ‘village life’ tour [which involved making corn tortillas by hand. It’s pretty tough] and a standout ‘flashlight boat trip’.

As well as spotting a pretty interesting array of wildlife [including 3 metre crocodiles which, honest gov, don’t attack humans so feel free to take a dip in the river. Yeah right!], the guide used a laser pointer to talk us through various constellations. I’ve only ever seen the Milky Way as prominently once before and it was stunning: the guys turned the engine off, and left us floating in the middle of the estuary, with absolutely no visible sources of light to spoil the effect.

This little fella worked his / her way into our room, early in the morning of the second night, an encounter which had us carefully knocking out the contents of our walking boots for the rest of the trip.

Early morning visitor

We had a really nice morning looking round the Mayan temples at Lamanai. The lodge had timed it that, apart from one other couple and their guide, we had the place to ourselves.

Lamanai Mayan Ruins

Lamanai Mayan Ruins – Big Head

…which has been plastered over to protect the original stonework from the elements. My gripe is that it wasn’t done very sympathetically.

Howler monkeys

…something I gave up on later in the holiday.

Yum

Anything but the dreaded ‘…and what do you do…?’ Me, I like to judge people from a distance, without the whole palaver of having to find out what job they do first :).

My goodness, my Guinness!

OK, I don’t want to get too technical, but this is a green bird…

A bird. With another bird.

…which I’ve completely failed to identify. We saw a few of these over the course of the stay:

Agouti

This fella also put in an appearance on our second day:

Arizona unicorn mantis

What a fantastic name for a beastie!

We’d pre-booked a couple of trips and had the option for more, but I fell into my standard long haul holiday pattern of starting to feel off colour at the end of the first week, and had a couple of lazy days, including one where my wife went to the market at San Ignacio, which she enjoyed [possibly because she was on her own :)]. Our first big trip based out of Black Rock was to the ATM caves. It was a physically challenging, but fantastic day out. Right up until I saw the camera shaped hole in the skull of one of skeletons, I was grumbling under my breath about not being able to take my little sports camera [a GoPro wannabe, which I’ve got a waterproof enclosure for].

We had an interesting trip to the cave. We were travelling with the guide in a group of 6: a father and daughter, two women and ourselves. I was talking to one of the women who I thought was possibly drunk. Given that she was about 60, it was about 10 in the morning and we were about to ford a river, I thought she was pretty keen, but who knew, a little bit of Dutch courage might have been what she needed. We’d been walking for about 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, and were somewhere between the second and third river crossing when we noticed quite a distinctive smell. I, in my naivety, immediately thought that we might be passing near by some pecaris: our guide at Lamanai a few days before had pointed out that they have a pretty distinctive musky sort of smell. Looking back at this, I can just imagine my wife rolling her eyes at me; at the time I thought my jungle tracker super-skills had just landed. Anyway, about a minute later, we realised that the woman I thought had been drunk had suffered a spectacular sphincteral failure, and had pooed herself. Wearing shorts. In a group of people. Passing another group that happened to be heading to cave at the same time. And we’re not talking a little whoops-a-daisy squeak: there was poo running down the back of both of her legs to her feet.

It’s funny the way these scenes play out. Rather than sympathy, the group immediately regressed to the rules of the school playground. The only goal, and the one thing that was trying to jostle the smell from my brain, was the thought that we needed to cross the next river in front of her. The rest of the group was coming independently to the same conclusion and there was a not-quite-running foot race developing. Cue the Benny Hill music.

The woman cleaned herself up – probably launching an epidemic of dysentery in the otherwise crystal clear water of the river – and subsequently made it about 2/3 of the way through the cave – with no-one standing behind her at any point in time, I hasten to add.

So, as you might have guessed, my sympathy levels were pretty low. Yes, rather than drunk, she was probably medicating. But, what was she thinking? ‘I don’t feel well, but damn it, I’ve come all this way so I’m going to have a bash at this physically demanding day out.’ Or later: ‘OK, the gates have opened. Oops. I’m just going to try and brazen this bad boy out. Maybe no-one noticed’.

Really?!? I’m sorry, but either you don’t go – to the cave! – or, if it’s a super emergency, sprint off the path, drop your trollies and drop the kids. Fair enough, eye contact might be as light on the ground as waterproof toilet roll but people will understand: everyone has close shaves with the holiday trots. I remember one particularly tricky moment on my one and only diving holiday, struggling like mad to get out of a wet suit with the clock ticking down. But, back to the cave woman: to just try and walk it off? Or, if you are that ill in the first place?

Stay indoors. You know, next to the toilet.

Rio Frio

Ceiba tree

Brown pelican

We had one last mini-adventure to unfurl on the trip home. We’d arranged a pickup with the ground agent to get us to the airport a couple of hours before they had suggested, which turned out to be a good job. Our driver was stopped at a police check-point and told that his insurance had expired, which was an arrestable offence. His car would have to be impounded, he’d have a night in jail and could arrange bail for a release the next day. We were sat in the back of the car, thinking, yeah, shame, but we need to get to the airport pretty soon. The driver called his son and, after a testing 45 minutes wondering how reliable this arrangement was going to be, he appeared in a very fancy 4 wheel drive and took us to the airport at breakneck speed.

The airport at Belize City appears a little chaotic to the uninitiated: e.g., a mismatch on flight departure times between the main board and the gate, and a very strange seat allocation mechanism that seemed to involve a lot of shouting. Our flight was duly called and, when I realised there were only going to be 3 passengers, my hopes of a nice 737 started to evaporate. We were in a single engined plane for the 90 minute flight. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t the air pressure differential on the wing combined with thrust that was keeping the plane in level – and admittedly fairly smooth – flight, but an act of intense willpower on my behalf. I was a nervous wreck by the time we landed. My wife loved it. We landed at a small, separate terminal and, because our pilot and co-pilot accounted for exactly 40% of the people going through the place, cleared customs and immigration control in about 5 minutes. At Belize City airport, we’d arranged for a private taxi to take us to the main terminal for international flights – vastly overpriced [$35] but worth it to make sure we were in plenty of time for final leg of the journey home.

So, all in all, a very enjoyable trip. It has to be said, it was a quite expensive one. While some of that is down to currency exchange rates, it was principally because the accommodation was pretty dear. Bottom line, it was still one of the best holidays we’ve had. The people were really friendly, and the country itself has a great mixture of history, wildlife and beaches to offer.

Thoroughly recommended.

Photography Footnotes

I took my tripod but not my 16-35mm lens, which was a mistake. There are plenty of opportunities for taking shots of the Milky Way [something I’d never tried before], and missing a wide shot of the Rio Frio cave was a bit of a shame.

It’s also worth taking a shutter remote. I had a half-pissed brainwave to improvise by putting the camera on the B setting, and using the off/on to trigger the shutter by holding the shutter release button down by using a Neurofen and about 10 Band Aids [cue my wife rolling her eyes again.] It nearly worked, but I got a bit of movement in the camera body when I turned it on and off – a combination of a beer-induced unsteady hand, and setting the tripod up on less than solid ground.

Best of a bad lot, this was a 111 second exposure [I had a Band Aid failure which closed the shutter] at f4 and ISO 800. I also bounced the flash around the foreground. Going to f2.8 and wide on the 16-35mm would have just made the difference:

Stars – don’t look too closely…