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Nothing but pics in this post. Please enjoy the animals. Savuti is part of the Chobe National Park system in the Okavango Delta region of Botswana. Of the four parks in the Delta we visited, Savuti was the most dry, and I often found the word "desolate" bouncing around my head, even though that's not really apt. But there's something lonesome about the scenery. And it was littered with elephant bones, which gave it kind of an ominous feel, like we were stepping into a more wild frontier. 

 But there were plenty of alive elephants, too! We watched them at a very nice water hole one evening. 

Daytime water hole. Man-made hole, water pumped in. Seems like a good idea to quench parched elephants and other critters in the brutal dry season, and works well for safari visitors to see a nice clump of animals. But our guide pointed out that it disrupts the animals' natural migration and wandering patterns and they may stay around the area when they really should be moving on, when nature would take away the water and coax them into their traditional patterns. So there are good and bad aspects to it. The second pic down, it's not even in focus but I really liked how the branches stick up behind the elephant's head like a little wacky hairdo. Mad scientist elephant. 

But even in the dry season, beautiful flowers make their way into the landscape. This is a rather indelicate name for a delicate flower: knobbly combretum. 

And they are super yummers to the giraffes. 

My favorite African bird ... really my favorite bird, period ... is the lilac breasted roller. We had some gorgeous lighting on it one morning. 

Here's a new bird for me, a korhaan doing a mating dance for a rather unimpressed female. Our guide said he'd never seen that bird in mating form before. It was hilarious to watch him chase the female around and subject her to watching the big red bloom open up on his head. She just didn't care and would scamper off, only to be pursued and re-subjected. Poor guy. I personally think his flower-like hat is rather dashing! 

Savuti was the second place we witnessed the grace and intensity of a leopardess (read more about that amazing, magical experience HERE). Here are a couple more shots of her. 

The terrain in Savuti was more rugged than the other parks we visited in the Okavango region. Can you pick out the elephants here walking up the rocky hill? Not the typical landscape for an elephant. 

This little elephant on the side of the road says, "good night!"

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Chobe National Park in northern Botswana is renowned for its elephant population, particularly dense during Botswana's winter months, May-September. The Chobe River attracts herds of them who come to drink, swim, and frolic in the mud. The best way to see this is to take a boat ride. And so we did. It's truly great fun to watch them playing in the mud. This was the best viewing I've had on any safari yet of baby elephants ... something I'm always craving to see more of. Simply glimpsing them standing beside their mothers and family is an adorable sight.

But watching them play and wrestle with each other in the mud was a delight of a whole new order.  

But it's not as if the adults weren't getting a little goofy and playful themselves. I think this might be my favorite photo from the whole trip, this adult elephant in this comical position, head-first in the mud, back leg up in the air.  

Naturally, we ran into several of one of the African waters' primary inhabitants: hippos. I always like seeing their titanic bodies out of the water. This one has a little egret friend with him. 

And the other more sinister ubiquitous creature lurking in the African waters: a NIle crocodile. I've become rather fond of crocodiles as a result of all my trips to the crocodile reserve in Mexico. But only when they are lying still and not menacing anybody! I like how the sun lit up his scales to a rather golden hue. 

The elephants do not seem to mind these sets of vicious teeth all around them as they frolic. What a joy to see a whole family joining in the muddy fun all together.  Some other creatures stood along the banks during our boat ride. A young waterbuck, quite adorable, I must say, looking all shaggy and fuzzy, his white target ring just beginning to show on his butt. Next pic down, his mom and dad (presumably, though they could be complete strangers in the same place at the same time) -- a male and female waterbuck, and a couple impala in the foreground.

An African darter. 

We  also had some more delightful southern carmine bee-eater sightings throughout Chobe National Park, whom we'd first spotted in Moremi. How can you not be smitten with these colorful creatures? 

And this was unexpected to me ... another animal I love from my contact with them in Mexico: the spoonbill. These, however, are African spoonbills rather than roseate. You can probably guess that they're the guys standing on either side of the yellow-billed stork. I like when birds are given practical, obvious names ... much easier to remember!  

Marabou storks ... hard to get a sense of scale here, but they're huge birds, standing about four feet high, and can have wing spans approaching 8 feet. They're also creepy. They're also cool. They're also little devils. I had to contend with them while I worked in the UWEC (Entebbe zoo). There was one who sometimes stood around the cafe patio where I ate, and he stole a big piece of chicken right off my plate. I was so diligent to keep an eye on the vervet monkeys so they didn't steal anything, and then that marabou walks by and snatches up my dinner. 

And of course the ubiquitous red-billed hornbill. I still think they're neat.  

A very non-ubiquitous critter is the honey badger. I caught a glimpse of one running away in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve the previous year, but we had two very nice sightings in Chobe. Difficult to photograph as it was surrounded by tall weeds and was mosting moving. These are very clever creatures ... I saw a TV show about one in a sanctuary who ingeniously figured out how to escape from an enclosure first by simply climbing the fence and unlocking the gate, then by digging a tunnel underneath a cement wall, then by rolling rocks over to the wall, stacking them up and standing on them until he was tall enough to climb over the wall, then by moving branches to form a ladder and climb over the wall, then any tools like rakes or shovels left by workers in the enclosure he used as ladders. Very funny. But they are also quite renowned for their ferocity. 

Sable antelope are quite shy and not terribly common to see either. We saw some up in northern Namibia in Bwabwata and the Mahango Core Area. But these were the only ones we got a good, if fleeting, look at in Botswana. Their latin name is kind of funny: hippotragus niger. They don't seem very hippo-like to me, haha. 

Another little creature not terribly common to see was a slender mongoose. In these poses, I'd call him plump before I'd call him slender! But his long tail seems like his most distinguishing feature! Were it me, I think I'd name him a black-tipped mongoose. 

Botswana's Chobe National Park borders Namibia along the Caprivi Strip, the two countries divided by a ribbon of water. We spent our evenings down near this stretch of water with elephants and lions all around us. The lions were typically on our side of the water watching the elephants typically on the opposite side. 

Not the grandest photo in quality, but I just really like how that whole line of elephants is drinking. Obviously a thirsty bunch. 

Now ... are you ready for some lions?? We watched this pride come back from the water to their homebase in the bushes as the sun was setting. Something magical about a big family trotting home after a hard day watching elephants and zebras and other potential prey. But first, before heading back, this little lion practices his fiercest expressions. Gotta be ready for when the day comes he's old enough to hunt himself!

So as we're sitting in the vehicle, the water at the Namibian border is on our left, we're parked just outside a kind of wall of low bushes along the edge of the marsh on our right. Baboons are sitting along this same strip quietly grooming each other as the sun nears the horizon. The lion pride reaches the bushes in front of us and disappears into them as if it's some kind of magical doorway, like the fabled hole in the back of the wardrobe. The bushes don't seem dense enough or extensive enough to hide a pride; I expected that when we drove our vehicle back through the bushes toward camp, we would see them on the other side. But we didn't. They vanished somewhere. We saw the same thing the following night. And driving by there another time during the middle of the day, a male and female emerged as if by magic from that same doorway. It was peculiarly mysterious. Sisters sit near the "doorway" here. 

This is from a different part of the park and at sunrise rather than sunset, but you know how I love capturing a critter with its tongue out. Even very large, intimidating critters. 

And guess what: We weren't done seeing leopards! So in three of the four parks we visited in the Okavango Delta, we saw leopards. Considering I had hoped to see this animal in particular on this trip, I think we did pretty well! Can you pick out her face in the first pic below? :-) 

While the leopard is the manifestation of stealth and grace, the cape buffalo can generally be taken as the dictionary illustration of "cantankerous." The males in particular being notoriously ill-tempered. But sometimes they look sweet as can be, like they would never scare a fly. The first one below calmly lets his oxpecker friend clean his hide, not minding the indignity of having a bird perched on his face. And I think the last buffalo is hoping to get on the cover of GQ Buffalo. Maybe he's singing, "I'm a sexy beast!"

OK, dear reader, thanks for hanging out with me on yet another virtual safari!  If I'm still maintaining this blog next year (2019), you'll probably get to join me on a whole new set of safari adventures. (and p.s. if you're not already a subscriber, if you don't want to miss when a new post goes up, enter your email address into the "Updates" bubble on the right!) 

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In our four-park safari through the Okavango Delta, the second place we stayed was the Khwai Concessions. At the end of the day, I think this was my favorite. I liked the terrain, the landscape, it had the greenest, wettest and most vibrant feel to it. Perhaps suffering through the heat made me feel unduly appreciative of this nature. But also, we had my favorite sightings here. The most stunning was our encounter with a leopard, which you can read more about in my Tuesday Tale, "The Leopardess: Encounters in Botswana." But here are a few extra pics of her: 

In my previous Botswana post, "Back on Safari in Moremi Woo-Hoo!" I mentioned how excited I was to see African wild dogs, also known as painted dogs. I had been pleased as punch with these sightings in Moremi, but my pleasure just about hit overload the morning we found a whole pack of wild dogs with ten puppies in Khwai, romping and chasing and wrestling and running hog-wild (yes, even though they're dogs, haha).  

And then it did just go off the charts when the dogs led us to the leopardess! That was one glorious safari morning. 

In light of all this mega excitement, we nearly ditched the activity that had been planned for late morning. It was an extreme change of pace, but I'm glad we did not miss it. We boarded some little dugout canoes, a traditional type of transport in the Okavango region called a mokoro or makoro -- two tourists and a guide per canoe -- and very lazily navigated through a water channel densely populated with water lilies.

Our guide stopped several times to point out the smaller members of the local animal kingdom and minute details about the flora and landscape, which I would never ever have seen without his guidance, and I'm thankful for it. No, this little frog isn't quite as enchanting as a leopard, but it's pretty cool -- tiny thing clinging to a tube of grass. See Erik's hand for scale (he took the pic). 

And this alone was worth the mokoro trip for me: a pair of African jacana eggs. They are super tiny eggs, absolutely exquisite. They look like they're hand-painted as a piece of art, or to me they look like some kind of dense, polished rock, like they make bowls and plates out of at the rock shop in my town. How on earth the guides ever found these eggs is beyond me, but it certainly makes me respect the knowledge of the local people who pay such close attention to their surroundings. 

And what comes out of these tiny eggs? A tiny jacana bird! Again, Erik's hand provides some scale for this little creature hiding in the marsh grasses. Do you notice those giant feet coming out from underneath the bird, looking almost like giant spider legs, grasping the dead reed? Those crazy things belong to that itty bitty bird! So these birds have some funny nicknames such as "Jesus bird" and "lily trotter" because of their amazing ability to walk on the flimsiest rafts of marsh weeds and lily pads (which can look like they're walking on water), and it's due to those feet that function, rather like snowshoes do on snow, to spread their weight. The second photo below is an adult jacana, I took that pic in the marshes in Moremi.   

On the way back to camp, we found the dog pack again, cached out in the shade of a small grove of trees, the little ones dozing fitfully in a giant puppy pile. But there's always one who just can't sleep! 

Then we got up the next morning and found them again! We tried to keep track of them running through the bushes, careening around on the maze of dirt paths our guide knew so well, as we thought they were chasing down an impala. But it proved impossible. I confess I'm disappointed in 90% of the photos I snapped of the African wild dogs in Khwai, but I'm 100% thrilled with having watched them with my own fleshy eyeballs. 

Another cool thing I watched was this little drama between a saddle billed stork and a fish eagle. The eagle kept wanting to land and the stork was simply not having it. If the eagle simply wanted to hang out on the ground, I suppose he could have gone elsewhere, to a section that was not patrolled by a stork, so maybe in fact he was somehow taunting the stork who kept snapping back at him. 

Here's a more composed saddle billed stork calmly wading through the water. I must say I don't tire of these birds either.

Here's our Red Siren friend, the groundbill, again, and though he's walking in a different colored landscape than in Moremi, he has not grown any more cautious with his flashy wattle. 

A duck fond of red, wading in the marshy waters.

Our original itinerary was to spend three nights in each of four parks. But there were troubles with the staff truck (which had to carry all of our tents and food and wonderful staff), so we stayed over a fourth night in Khwai. I didn't feel sad about this because I had been very much enjoying this game reserve, but then when we got to spend the extra afternoon with the lion family, whose story I gave you in "Family Tale in the Okavango Delta," I thanked whatever gnome tinkered with the truck and kept us here, allowing us this precious gift. I'd never before simply hung out with one particular group of animals for several hours, watching their day unfold in the freedom of their wilderness. It was so special, particularly when that group of animals included lion cubs!!!! I had really been hoping to see some young lions. Please read about the events of their afternoon HERE, and please enjoy some more time with the darling cubs below. 

Mom and cub simultaneous tongue action! For a gal who loves it when she captures an animal with its tongue out, this was the jackpot!  

Now check out how huge mom's tongue is as she licks her affectionate cub's face -- practically as big as its whole face. And then look how cute the cub's little tongue is giving its mum a sweet lick on her nose. 

We saw plenty of adult male lions, too. And I can never see too many of these magnificent animals with their brilliant manes and regal demeanors. This guy, though, looks to me like he's feeling melancholy or wistful. I wanna go hug him and ask him what's up. Here he's looking more like his old lion self ... he has recovered his thoughts to whatever lions normally think of in the early morning. Look at the ear of the next fellow, though, how notched it is -- he's clearly had a few good tussles in his life. 

For lots more lions, read about our time in Chobe National Park, which was particularly rich with elephant and lion encounters. 

But back to baby animals ..... baboon youngsters are some of the most manic and entertaining creatures to watch when they rumble with each other. These little guys were getting on their kung fu moves!

Very young baboons have it pretty easy, leisurely riding along on mom's back or clinging to her underside as she walks. Do you notice what challenge this baby's mom has overcome? Makes you wonder if she was born that way or suffered an injury later in life. 

I love this scene of a male kudu and his spectacular horns strolling through the marsh, indifferent to the baboons all around him. It's a scene peaceful and calm, yet dynamic at the same time, similar to one I posted from Moremi with the waterbuck and baboons. The only thing that would have made it better is if one of those baboons had jumped on the kudu's back.  

My two favorite African antelope species: A male kudu, mid-munch; and a shaggy female waterbuck.

Is a safari post complete without a picture of a giraffe? I'm not sure, but just to be safe, here's a super little baby, not even as tall as the branches of an acacia tree.  

Evening descends in the Khwai Concessions, and it actually seems to cool off a tad. Maybe because of being surrounded by the water. That special golden light of evening highlights a spray of water from a hippo, the texture of the underside of an elephant's amazing trunk, a bird's wings, my brown hair, and all the sweet moments of the day parading through my memory as we prepare to head back to camp and enjoy an evening glass (or three) of wine, the nightly appetizer of popcorn (hurray!), and dinner by gas lantern before lying down in my tent in the Botswana bush, ready to hear the sounds of night and imagine the nocturnal world around me.  

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Continuing at my exceedingly leisurely posting pace, allow me to take you back to Chios Island, where I volunteered at a refugee camp in 2017. Souda camp has since closed down and all refugees relocated. Some to better camps on the mainland, and some to the way more miserable Vial camp on Chios. The refugee crisis continues unabated as the homes and families caught in Middle Eastern chaos and war are steadily and ruthlessly destroyed. Please don't forget about these people whose lives have been stripped away from them in the worst possible ways. If you haven't read about my time there and wish to, please go HERE. 

Prior to beginning our volunteer work, Erik and I spent several days driving around and touring the island, which was abundant in quaint villages and impressive ruins. In contrast to the southern mastic villages we visited, the villages on the northern side of the island were built into the rolling hills with sweeping views and more defensible spaces. But today they lie partially abandoned, like the southern villages, and some of them are home to nearly nobody but ghosts.

As I mentioned in my posts about the southern villages and the roadside shrines, it's very easy to drive around the island, and half of the enjoyment of the villages is simply getting to them. Allow me to share just a few of our destinations with you.  

Anavatos is abandoned now except to the wandering tourist and a handful of people who man the cafe and gift shop. Oh, and who feed the cats, of course! This was the most impressive hilltop village, a Byzantine "tower-village" perched at the very top of a range of hills. Yet, it was raided numerous time by pirates and brutally sacked completely, along with the rest of Chios, in 1822 by the Ottoman Turks in what is known as the Chios Massacre, and much of whatever managed to persevere after that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1881. 

Sadly, the massacre, which happened during the Greek War of Independence, was sorely undeserved. Although most of Greece was in revolt against the Turks, the Chios inhabitants had no desire to be involved. The Turkish sultans had maintained good relations with the island on account of its mastic production and trade. But other Greeks fighting the sultan came to the island, and the sultan made the erroneous assumption it was the Chians taking up arms. He was particularly infuriated in light of the amicable relationship he thought he had with Chios. He felt betrayed and ordered his forces to carry out a complete genocide of the islanders. No village, not even those on the hilltops, was spared.  

As you can see, the inhabitants had a clear view of their surroundings and could only really be attacked on one side. But the hilltop advantage wasn't enough to save it. The Turkish fleet landed on Chios's shores in April of 1822 and promptly began carrying out their orders: to kill everyone on the island. Approximately 50,000 Chians were killed, another 50,000 enslaved, and about 20,000 managed to escape and flee to the European mainland. Thousands more died of diseases after all the pillaging, or maybe of broken hearts, considering how many of their family and friends suffered and died. After all was said and done, only about 2,000 people remained on the entire island. The current population is a little over 50,000. 

It's not as though this kind of sorrow is not known throughout Europe and throughout the entire world, over and over again through history; still, the quaint beauty of the stone buildings and the spring flowers in the rolling hills quivers a little under the weight of such a massacre. 

Some of the buildings still shelter various abandoned items such as the little shrines below.  

And of course, what is a Greek village without a kitty cat?? 

Want more kitties? Check out Kitties of Chios post all about the friendly feline inhabitants of the island. 

Our favorite village we stopped at a couple times for lunch, snacks and exploration, was Volissos. It's another village sprawling up to a hilltop fort, and unlike Anavatos, is still inhabited in large sections. While Anavatos is in the interior of the island, Volissos is near the coast and commands authoritative views of both land and sea. But of course, it was raided and then sacked just like everywhere else on the island. It has a very long history, however, and persistent legend names it the birthplace of Homer. Even the revered Herodotus makes mention of Homer writing his epic stories here. It was nice to stand on the hill and imagine for a moment the muse of such a titanic contribution to literature whispering in the ears of the imaginative Homer. 

Because of the mix of abandoned and currently-used buildings, we sometimes presumed we had found one type but had instead found the other. We'd been wandering a narrow street characterized mostly by abandonment when we ran across this church below the street. 

We thought it was probably abandoned and scrambled down the hillside to the entrance and found, to our surprise, the door unlocked, welcoming us inside to this lovely little space, clearly still in use. 

We saw a lot of these metals frame with painted faces behind them. Not knowing anything about the Greek Orthodox religion, I had to Google them after I got home. So I learned these free-standing (unmounted) frames are actually considered as shrines and are intended to be portable so they can be used in processions or other ceremonies outside of the church. The painted face is usually a saint, and at least one ceremony that the shrine will be carried outside the church for is the name day of the patron saint. 

This abandoned building appealed to me largely for the simple detail of the two buckets hanging near the window at the top. I would have liked it anyway, but when you include those, I *really* like it. I also appreciate ruins being digested by vines and other plants, even though it means the ultimate destruction of the building. Still, I'm mesmerized by the floral feasting. 

This is typical of rooms we ran across in our abandoned-town wanderings. Just full of random stuff, remnants of lives past and passed, jumbled together by no obvious organizing factor. 

I always feel partial to scenes of abandonment in which the story is still so tangible or the lives so easily imagined. For example in my Tuesday Tale from Mesta, "A Life Left to Cats." (The first photo below was included in a brief photo essay in Gravel online magazine.) Both of these pics below seemed to me sad yet picturesque settings for ghosts, and metaphors for the human condition of being inextricably tethered to time, either restrained by it or liberated, depending on our choices -- to stay locked inside the past or to step forward into the light of the unknown.  

And how do you know that Volissos is a genuine Greek village?? Surely you know the answer, in the form of this little critter hanging about ..... 

While we drove to some villages as destinations to spend time in the entire village, some others we stopped at spontaneously or only briefly to see one particular thing mentioned in a guidebook. I don't remember the names of those places, but here are a few shots of some of those stops, just for a feel of the island villages in general. Also a typical view from the northern hilly roadsides where the villages were nestled in so comfortably. 

Nea Moni Monastery was built in the mid-11th century. The story goes that three monks on the island found a holy icon of the Virgin Mary hanging from a tree branch, and the monastery was built on that spot by the Byzantine emperor whose rise to power was foretold to him by those same monks, who said they saw it in a vision. The monks were promised a monastery if their vision came to pass. In 1042 it did, and so the emperor kept his word and began constructing Nea Moni. It's now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

There are still some well-preserved frescoes in the interior. I liked the colored stone, too. 

Nea Moni was not spared during the 1822 Chios Massacre. Here is a plaque inside the monastery talking about it: 

What Erik and I really appreciated about this place was the mix of ruins and preservation. So often you visit a place either all in ruins, or else all preserved or restored or reconstructed. But like so many of our favorite villages on the island -- Volissos, Pyrgi, Mesta -- this ancient holy complex had a nice mix of both present and past to explore and admire. 

And here's your random photo of the day. A pay phone booth next to a grazing donkey and the ruins of a monastery. So I guess the booth, too, is technically a ruin ... abandoned and illustrating a time past. 

In retrospect, I'm not really sure why I didn't take more pictures around Chios Town, which is where we spent the majority of our time. It's the hub of the island, where more than half of the island's population lives, and the main port area. There is a nice medieval town center with the narrow passageways typical of such historic towns, and a center courtyard ringed by cafes and shops. The narrow alleys are quaint until you get stuck in one with a car and need to turn around. Remember that scene from Austin Powers where he's doing the 5-point turn in the golf cart? That was us a couple times, but add a couple more points and me outside the car spotting so we didn't scratch the rental car on the buildings. No way in heck would I be driving the streets in this town, nor many old European towns, where you have to pull in your side mirrors not to hit parallel-parked cars and pedestrians. And ALWAYS pull in the mirror while you're parked! Erik's a trooper as our official trip driver.  

Here are just a few shots from around town. There is also a nice central park with trees and park benches, and cafes around the outside. One evening there was a big soccer match on TV, and even the outdoor cafes and bars put up big TV screens for the patrons to watch on. It had a very nice community feel in general. However, the community vibe was being whittled away by the tension between the exploding refugee population and the locals, particularly an active fascist party that was physically aggressive toward the camps and refugees. While we were there, a new hospital was being built in Chios Town and its administration said that it would treat refugees who needed its services. Some of the islanders staged protests against this -- they wanted refugees denied medical care. 

But here are some random peaceful streets. We found the food in town always delicious, just FYI should you wish to check out this lovely Aegean island for yourself. Many, many restaurants, cafes, pubs in the central part of town and along the waterfront. So, although the island has its share of tragedies both historical and current, it's well worth a stop to see the bountiful beauties. 

And of course ... a kitty. Oh wait! That's no kitty! An imposter. A sweet dog that was just down the block from our hotel in Chios Town. We walked past him several times in our daily quests to park our car as close to the hotel as possible on these narrow streets. Our little friend. It felt a bit weird that his owners left their front door open all the time. How can you not want to push it open and walk inside?? Well, we managed to restrain ourselves. 

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