This post has been a while coming partly because the amazing awesomeness of Chobe National Park is so huge that it’s a pretty intimidating post to write.  This, for me, was a completely magical day.  I wanted elephants and I got ELEPHANTS.  Tiny baby elephants, elephants having mud baths, a huge herd of elephants crossing a river, and even sunset elephants.  This park has the highest concentration of elephants in the world.  In fact, they like it so much that if they try to take the elephants elsewhere to redistribute the population the elephants will walk back over 700 kms to get back to this park.

We got up in the morning in Livingstone, in Zambia and had to wait for some new people to join the tour.  There was a bit of a miscommunication between the head office and our tour leader (the didn’t tell him that some people were not going to show up!) which resulted in a bit of a mad dash to get the ferry across the border.  Fortunately, our guide was looking out for us and arranged for our game drive vehicles to meet us straight off the boat and take us directly to see the animals.

We had a really nice game drive vehicle and driver and had about 2.5 hours of driving up and down the Chobe river looking for wildlife.  There were so many amazing sightings, so if you want to see all the pictures click on any of these and it will take you through to the gallery.  But here are some of my favorite things!  (EDIT: ok, there are about a million pictures below.  But it really was that great!)

First view of the Chobe River

Hippo!

We were amazed at how close to the animals we were.  Many of these pictures aren’t even zoomed in!

Sable Antelope

Kingfisher fishing

Little Bee Eater

Baby Elephant! Estimated to be 2 days old!

Croc eating a fish

One more of the baby elephant

Giraffes in a row

Lilac breasted roller

Fish Eagle

And that wasn’t all!  Sorry if you’re bored of incredible animals already, but there is more!  We went on a sunset cruise along the river and saw SO MANY animals.

Hippos

More elephants! Looking majestic.

Tiny baby hippo

And then we saw something that I will never forget as long as I live.  There are islands in the middle of the river and lots of the animals like to sleep on them for safety.  Our boat pulled up to where a huge group of elephants were about to swim across the river for the night.  We got to watch the whole thing!

Elephants getting ready to cross the river

First, three large elephants crossed

Then the mothers and babies clumped together to keep the babies safe

Into the river!

The big elephants helped the babies keep their trunks above water

Made it!

And then we had an incredible sunset!

Incredible sunset colors

It was a long, but absolutely perfect day.  This was one of the very best days of this safari and the amount of wildlife we saw was so much more than I had expected.  We were at another nice campground that evening and enjoyed sitting around the fire getting to know the people who had joined the tour that morning.