Atlasville, 3 January 2009
All good things must come to an end. We will be back home this evening, but not before we have had a final game-viewing drive. Our flight back to Maun only leaves at 12:35 so plenty of time to go for a drive, shower and change, and pack our bags.
We headed north, in fact the furthest north yet, to the area of Jones Pan. Like yesterday nothing too exceptional, although I did get a photo of our first Tsessebe of the trip and finally took a shot of a male Impala. They are so common you tend to dismiss them with “Oh, another impala” but they are no less photogenic. On the bird front Jones Pan did turn up a skulking Greater Painted-snipe but no photo of this one. There were further additions to the trip list with Fawn-colored Lark, Spotted Flycatcher and Blue-billed Teal. Only bird photo was of an immature Lilac-breasted Roller.
Back at camp I took a final wander round before getting ready for the flight and was rewarded with a photo of this Phantom Flutterer dragonfly. Then while showering in the ‘open-air’ shower I had to grab my camera as there was a pair of yesterday’s lifer Swamp Boubou sitting in the tree above me. I suppose that was a lifer of sorts, the first (and maybe only) time that I have taken a bird photo while showering!
We were packed and ready to head to the air strip on the stroke of midday and even managed to swell the trip bird list by adding Red-backed Shrike on the short drive. We had had no rain during our stay to disrupt our schedule at Lebala but there some very ominous rainstorms on the horizon as we boarded the plane and had to dodge one of these shortly after take-off. We spent most of the flight looking down at the many different guises of the Okavango landscape, before landing in Maun and being jolted back to reality with our flight to Johannesburg.
The trip had certainly lived up to what we had hoped for. After years of self-guided self-drive trips to the Kruger National Park and some of the other South African national parks it was nice to pampered in true ‘safari’ fashion.
