They weren't kidding.
We skipped this ride. Must be getting soft.
Smugglers of some sort racing away from the ferry from Zambia to Botswana after throwing their jerry cans onboard without paying.
KAZUNGULA BORDER POST, Botswana – Much of Botswana is one long, lonely road cut through an endless expanse of flat, unpeopled scrub land, where elephants outnumber cars and potholes outnumber people. Distances are vast, towns are few, and the dusty earth shimmers in the mean afternoon sun.
In other words, a bad place to be without a ride.
After crossing the Zambezi River from Zambia on a rickety pontoon ferry, we found out we had missed the last (only) bus out of the frontier. We still had about 650 km to go, so it was time to stick our thumbs out and escape the heat. It didn’t take long before two construction workers picked us up. Hitchhiking, or ‘hiking,’ as everyone in Southern Africa calls it, is so common there’s a nearly formalized system in Botswana.
The only stops we made for the next 300 km were for elephants, who would nonchalantly saunter out of the bush, loiter in the road, and slowly shove off. We were dropped at the ‘town’ of Nata, essentially a gas station, Chibuku bar, and a herd of cows at northern Botswana’s main road junction and 30 minutes later were in the cab of a soda truck, rocking out to South African pop two truckers were blasting to stay awake after a brutally long day on the road.
At sunset we arrived in Maun, at the edge of the Okavango Delta. Two rides, 650 km - our drivers even stopped to let us gape at the elephants.
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