Our Botswana trip was more than we dreamed of!!

Hi Clare

Our Botswana trip was more than we dreamed of!! It was exceptional, so much so that when Michael, Gavin's eldest son, gets married, we will include a trip to Namibia and other parts of Botswana that we didn't get to.

Clare, you did a fabulous job of organising our itinerary together with Desert and Delta. It was a great mix of land safari, water safari (including the walking safari) and the safari in the semi-desert, including the night out on the salt pan, which was unbelievable!

Of course, we met many other safari travellers and shared our stories. A number of them had been to Savuti and raved about the different and amount of game they saw and the kills. It seems a popular game lodge, so maybe it was fully booked by the time we contacted you to arrange our trip, or Savuti may not have fitted in with our itinerary. We will definitely visit it on our next trip.

The morning we arrived at Leroo La Tau, we were the only guests there, with a few guests arriving later that day. It was weird having lunch by ourselves (maybe our guide Ollie joined us, I can't remember), and, of course, there was very little atmosphere at that point. However, that changed in the evening when there were 8 of us. Our room (no. 10) overlooked the waterhole, but the water stopped outside room no. 8. We did ask if we could move rooms. They could only offer us room no. 6 for our 3rd night. As that first day progressed, we realised room 10 was not so bad as the elephants came to that end of the waterhole to enjoy the mud and sand bath, so we decided we would stay. We believe it was a good decision.

Baba, our guide at Camp Moremi, was incredible!! The staff at the other lodges knew him 😊. He was a guide to 6 of us, and within the first hour or so, he worked us all out pretty quickly, so much so that he allowed an older elephant to come right up to our jeep and let its trunk have a good sniff around and sniff certain people, including Franco, without any of us freaking out! He also knew how to read the other animals very well and knew when it was time to get out of the way of a trumpeting elephant mum with her baby! He had a great sense of humour too.

Joe, our guide at Xugana, was very good too, as was Ollie at Leroo La Tau.

The sleep-out at the salt pan, as we said, was an amazing experience. We are so pleased we did it. It is certainly worth the 4-hour trip both ways. We felt very honoured that the team who set up for our night – Reuben and Monare went to so much trouble to make our stay unforgettable. They cooked us a delicious dinner and breakfast, and we enjoyed chatting with them and Ollie around the campfire before retiring to our "bedroom😊" for the night. We were very warm under the stars and had a fantastic night's sleep. Ollie was very good at making conversation with us as we spent a lot of time with him over the 3 days, and we were his only guests except for the last game drive after we arrived back from the salt pan. We realised the guides need to know a lot of information regarding the politics of Botswana, the different stars in the galaxy, the different game, the bush, etc.

The agent from Desert and Delta who met us when we arrived and left Maun Airport was terrific too. I think her name is Promise or Precious. She had our soft bags and showed us where to pack them, and on our return, she had the map for us.

We were fortunate to meet Ernest (Erny), the assistant manager of Desert and Delta. He was on our flight from Maun to Moremi, which was great as he made decisions for the 6 of us on our flight to go to a restaurant outside the airport to have drinks and food (although the food arrived too late) after our flight was aborted on the runway as the brakes had failed. It didn't take too long to get another plane and pilot before we were in the air on our way to Moremi. The delay meant we didn't have time for the afternoon game drive, but we managed to see some game between the airstrip and Camp Moremi. Erny was working with the staff at Camp Moremi the whole time we were there, and then we "bumped" into him when he was visiting his in-laws at the village outside Leroo La Tau, which I am sure was arranged!! Erny was a great guy, and we enjoyed our conversations with him too.

I think we stayed the right number of days at each lodge. 3 nights at Leroo La Tau we feel would have been too long if we hadn't visited the salt pan.

Gosh, there is a lot in our email here, Clare, but I hope it is beneficial to you, your team and future guests.

Thanks again for arranging the fruit basket and wine at Camp Moremi and Xugana – that was very special.