BOTSWANA: BABOONS AND HIPPOS AND WILD DOGS AND CHEETAHS AND A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING ELSE

We slept very well on our first night in Kadizora Camp in the Okavango Delta and woke up about 15 minutes before our 5:30 wake up call. We quickly washed and dressed and were escorted to the common area by KT as it was still dark and we were not allowed to walk around the camp in the dark without an escort. He left us there for 30 minutes to have our morning "coffee" (a mug of hot chocolate) and some dry but surprisingly tasty biscuits (aka cookies). At 6:30 we were on the road:

KT was ever vigilant in looking for signs of wildlife:

Good morning, Botswana!

 Our first sighting of the morning was a pair of regal waterbuck:

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA: CHEETAH OUTREACH

Exhausted from 30+ hours of traveling, we nevertheless jumped (okay, crawled) into our rental car and headed down the wrong side of the road (for us) to our first South African destination: Cheetah Outreach, a somewhat controversial plot of land outside of Cape Town.

The goal of Cheetah Outreach seems obvious--to educate the public and to preserve, protect, and increase the cheetah population, which has dwindled from 100,000 in the early 20th century to a mere 6,000 living in the wild today. 

The controversy arises from the breeding of cheetahs to be used as "ambassador animals" that are never introduced into the wild, and from the fact that people who pay the entrance fee are allowed to touch the animals. This "hands-on" practice is getting increasingly taboo in the animal rights world.

We were blissfully unaware of the controversy when we planned our trip, but I have to say that I didn't like seeing speedy cheetahs on leashes: