Wednesday 25 September - Drive to Ngweshla Campsite, Hwange National Park

Woken at 6am by the South Africans having breakfast.  Had a bad headache so got up but managed set the car alarm off which not only didn't help my head but woke the entire campsite up!  Wandered over to the ablution block but was informed by the SAs that there was no water.  Decided that the call of nature was more important than whether there was a flushing loo but it turned out that the attendant must have just come on duty and switched the water on as it was working fine in the ladies.  Enjoyed a fab breakfast of bacon and eggs and the smell finally encouraged Ian to get up.

We were just about ready to leave when a car pulled up and the driver, who was clutching a small brown parcel, asked us if we were going to Vic Falls.  Turned out he was trying to get some samples to the lab but everyone in the camp was heading south.  The samples would confirm if they had Anthrax in the elephant population - they already had confirmation that it was in the hippos (which explained the dead hippo from yesterday).  His concern was not the elephants as the park is over populated already but the kudu which were much more scarce.

We left camp before 9am with the aim of a leisurely drive to our next campsite - obviously this would not be our reality! We ended up taking a 2.5 hour detour in the morning around some narrow tracks around Sinamatella which meant we were behind schedule all day.  Having only got an A4 print out of a map that I had found on the internet was not ideal - we had expected to be able to pick up a map in Robin's Camp but they didn't have any and clearly hadn't had for years.  We saw loads of elephants and elephant damage - the drought was clearly having a massive impact.  We did reach a river with some water at one point and saw a terrepin as well as lots of crocs. Also got to see more dead elephants!

Finally made it back onto the main drag only to make another fundamental error by trying to take what looked like a short cut on the map - big mistake!

The road was beautiful but after Dopi Pan we headed onto a sand track that was clearly viewed by the elephants as their private drive.  There were loads of bits of broken off trees all along the track and one of these got thrown up and damaged the running board on the passenger side - we were lucky it wasn't more damaged though.  After about 25km we suddenly came to a no entry sign.  What to do now - turn around and retrace our steps which was a very long way round or keep going as the route was so much shorter.  We kept going but immediately came to a large water filled pan with hundreds of elephants descending on it from every direction.

As the elephants were the most skittish elephants we had ever come across this was a slightly nervy situation.  We kept on going but soon found ourselves stuck behind a large herd of ellies meandering along the track.  We now had a problem - we could persevere but it could take hours as the ellies were clearly quite happy meandering along very very slowly or we could turn around and take the long route around.  Time was pressing on so we finally decided we had to turn around.  We headed back through the elephant pan, back to Dopi and onto the road past Jambile Campsite where we would stay in 2 days time.

By now the clock was ticking down rapidly and we were struggling to work out where we were versus where we needed to be.  Stress levels were definitely increasing and contingency plans were being silently considered.  Amazingly though with literally minutes to go before the 6pm cut off for driving in the park we suddenly saw a sign - hooray!! We actually arrived at Ngweshla camp at 5.58pm to find the camp all closed up but as we drove in Frankie the attendant appeared - he had assumed we were a no show so was a bit surprised to see us.  We were shocked at how bitterly cold it was when we got out of the car and the first job was to find fleeces, woolly hats and tracky bottoms!  Frankie lit us a huge fire and we cooked a quick meal of chicken, onions, peppers in tomato sauce with reheated baked spuds from yesterday.  We were relieved to get into bed at 8pm - it was freezing cold and very windy so was not likely to be a relaxing night's sleep.