We made reservations at a place called Maun Backpackers. It's a well known, small, budget outfit along the river. We got a very reasonably priced "tent" right on the water. It was beautiful! I use the word tent but it's more like a canvas room, complete with a full mattress and a bed stand. The camp just recently emerged from the flooding and you could see on the way in that many of the roads and bridges had to be remade. I wanted to go to the small game sanctuary but it was still underwater.

The first night in Maun we spent our evening around the bar at the camp chatting and making friends with some local safari guides. We decided to book a Mokoro day trip for the next day to see if we could go see some dipologolo (animals - my new favorite Setswana word, because its fun to say)

We left the camp just after 8am to get to our motorboat at Maun River Lodge. The motorboat took us up to a small village where some mokoro polers live. We were paired with a Canadian couple who were living in Gaborone while on sabbatical at the University of Botswana. We then set off in two small wooden dugout canoes. Ok, that's a lie, they were made of fiberglass. As disappointed as we were that we were not getting the authentic mokoro experience we were happy knowing it was all for the sake of saving old growth trees that are usually used for making the traditional mokoros. We glided along through the reeds of the delta in our gondola style transportation for a few hours. It was a wonderfully refreshing experience to be on the water after so long. A couple of hours into the trip an elephant was spotted. The rather unfortunate thing about being in a canoe in tall reeds is that you have to stand up to see past the reeds and we all know that standing up in a canoe can be a tricky feat. The elephant was on an island hidden behind some bushes relaxing in the shade of a tree. We really could only see his back. We moved on and slid our canoe onto the shore of the island. Our poler took the 4 of us on a walk-a-boute (Canadian funny, haha) around the island to see what animals we could see. Nothing. We saw the same elephant from a different angel but he was still hidden in the bush. The guide pointed out a lot of "shits" to us but, once again, the middle of the day is a horrible time to see animals. We did get to see a big baobab. When we got back to our boats we were excited to have some lunch and rest in the shade before our trip back. Unfortunately, our lunches were forgotten back at the camp. The trip back to the village was equally as tranquil as the trip in.

On Saturday we were able to have our most stress free shopping experience in Maun since we had a guaranteed ride home with our friend from Gumare. On the ride home I saw an elephant on the side of the road eating from a tree but Amanda wants me to forget about this and refuses to admit that it happened because she was sleeping.

We have decided that we wanted to have people see what our village really looks like. This is a tricky feat because just walking around taking photos of things draws a little too much attention, as if simply being white wasn't enough of a distraction. We have decided to create a virtual tour of our village by mapping our covert snaps onto Google maps using panoramia. Check it out. Check back because we plan to continue to add to this over time.