Two weeks earlier, our group of four vehicles gathered at Motipi, approximately 3km before the Groblersbrug border post and right next to the Limpopo River. It’s the perfect campsite to kick off your Botswana adventure, with convenient kitchen and bathroom facilities and strategically placed lights in the trees that will quickly make you forget about your worries. There was no easing into it for our field guides, Rushada Schutte and Pieter Kruger, who were peppered with questions about the birds and animals we would encounter from the get-go. It’s always nice to have people with you who are visiting Botswana for the first time, because then you get to experience everything afresh through their eyes.
Our first destination was the popular Elephant Sands Lodge, just north of the birdwatcher’s paradise, Nata. This is the place where one is likely to come closest to wild elephants, with Benny the Elephant being one of the biggest attractions at the lodge. During drier seasons, elephants flocked to Elephant Sands looking for water. Because there was only a small water hole, these majestic giants sometimes had to wait up to 18 hours for a turn to quench their thirst. In 2015, during one of the biggest droughts in decades, the elephants began digging out the pipes of the lodge’s
