Day three of idleness

Yet another lazy, lazy day.  We woke up late and lay in some more so by the time we actually emerged from our tent the day was already getting quite warm.  Today it was my turn to make bread while Viv and Caron went for a stroll together.  The bread turned out passably well as in, it was edible.

Rob and I are starting to look for 'things to do', I think the limit of the amount of time that I can spend doing nothing is rapidly approaching.  One of the nearby long drop's door hinge had broken which meant that it was impossible to close the door so Rob and I spent some time repairing it.  The hinge was pop riveted to the frame and the rivets had come adrift.  We actually had a riveter and rivets with us but unfortunately they weren't quite the right size so we ended up drilling out the remains and then sewing the hinge back onto the support with wire.  Not the way my grandfather would have done it for sure but it works and will probably hold up for a year or two.  So no more view from this particular room!  I am sure that the people in the campsite immediately in front of the long drop would appreciate the lack of a view.


Around midday a party of English, as in from the UK, people arrived and started to set up camp pretty much inside our campsite and we had to shoe them away to the next campsite.  They are clearly not used to camping judging from the antics that we watched with amusement while they set up camp.  They had just finished when we saw the two boys that they had with them scavenging for firewood amongst the already sparse vegetation.  Rob said that the last time that he had been at Kubu island one could walk through the thickets they were so thick so it seems that a decade of ill-behaved campers is having a very detrimental affect on the vegetation which isn't such great news.

Although the English may have been irresponsible from an environmental point of view they were at least friendly and came over for a chat and the kids ended up spending most of the afternoon playing together.

Being very allergic to bees, I now keep a careful eye on them and they seem to scout the campsite for anything interesting about twice a day and if they find anything then their buddies arrive en-masse which is not so good for me.  Still doing my very environmentally unfriendly trash burning exercise, distasteful as it is.

We had a treat after lunch when Caron brought out the ice cream she had been hiding from me from the bottom of the freezer.  Hot day, sitting in the shade wolfing down ice cream in the middle of a the Makgadikgadi pans.  What is not to like about that picture.

In the late afternoon, I convinced everyone to walk far out onto the salt pans to pose for some family portraits which worked out really well.

I continued taking photographs into the sunset and early evening of baobabs at night using a torch and, as luck would have it, a passing cars headlights.

Nightly burning of the rubbish which is a really distasteful task for everyone even if it was only me doing the actual burning.  Rob continues to bite back some remark about how bad it is for the environment and I agree with him but I think that it would be a disaster if I was stung by a bee and not just for me; it would ruin everyone's holiday.  The trick to burning rubbish is to have a very hot fire with plenty of flame so that the rubbish itself catches alight quickly and even the vegetable matter dries out quickly and then burns.  The cans quickly clean themselves and when these are crushed with the mallet when they are cool it leaves very little waste for us to take with us.