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We had a huge storm during the night – it was the first rains of the season. Lightning and thunder from around 11pm to 4.30 am, we had a strike that would have been only 50 meters from us!

We had a few leaks in the camper.

At around 5.30 we woke to the sound of loud revving, there was a bus like overlander vehicle parked in the campsite that was trying to get out, but kept getting bogged. They were chopping up trees and making a hell of a ruckus, eventually they got out.

There were water puddles everywhere. The dry river bed behind the campsite yesterday was now a raging torment of water!

We got on the road and headed towards Ramokgwebana (bots) / Plumtree border crossing ( zim).

Leaving Botswana was relatively simple. Not so much entering Zimbabwe. We eventually found where to park, and went to immigration – we ended up with a multiple entry visa so we could cross over to Zambia for the day – this was $USD 45 ea. and all paperwork is processed by hand. Next was the car, holely molely what a pain, we had to fill in more forms, as we had a rental vehicle we had to obtain a Commercial Vehicle Guarantee (CVG)- basically someone had to guarantee we would take the vehicle back out of the country ( really an excuse for more money) – a fixer as David called him assisted us, we went in & out of the offices for 2 ½ hours ,all of that mucking around and another $USD 150 later we could now go thru to customs. We finally had all our paper work completed, we just had to have someone inspect the vehicle (had to open it up for a look), then proceed through 2 more check points before we were freed.

We travelled for around 2 hours before we found the turn off for our campsite. There was no one there. It was drizzling and windy – very cold and miserable, not like we expected at all. We decided to go to the lodge and see if there were any rooms available rather than camping. You cannot drive up to the lodge area, you had to honk the horn for someone to come down the large rock face in one of the safari vehicles. We met Shepard who advised that there were rooms available & he would take us up so we could wait for the manager to get back & discuss with her. We made ourselves comfortable in the lounge area – out of the rain & had a warm drink. The reception & lounge area are all built around huge monolith type boulders. We met Lyn the manager who organised our room. After another trip down the bottom of the rock face we pulled out some random clothes for the night. We were shown to our room (there are 7 chalets in total ) which are built into the cliff face and face towards East so you can watch the sunrise – when there is sun. The rooms are pretty cool – all built of rocks & have reed & elephant grass thatch roofs, the view is impressive.

This has blown out our budget big time…but worth it!

We had a quick walk around the rock faces but as the wind got stronger, and the rain picked up, we went back to the room for a while, pulled up some chairs and looked out over the property with the binoculars to see what we could find – that would be nothing.

David and I sat around in lounge area for a bit until something went down David’s back, then we heard plonk, plonk, plonk, and realised one of the locale inhabitants – a Rock Dassie, was shitting from above – apparently this was good luck – but David wasn’t impressed.

We all met for dinner at 7pm – the food was lovely. 3 British travellers also turn up for the night just as we started.

We sat around the fire, while Lyn told us stories of poaching in the area, until heading back to bed as we decided to do a Rhino trekking tour in the morning & had to be ready to leave at 6.15am