Greetings from our Land Cruiser as Ken and I sit together at a water hole in Sunday Pan in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. This is the most remote portion of the trip and we have 8 jerry cans of diesel in the back and a full water tank with plenty of bottled drinking water. We are down to just two now as we said goodbye to Julie, Tenya, Jeanne, and Scott on 7 September and to Karen on 16 September. We've driven over 3,000 miles so far. The itinerary is still being updated as we travel.

1. What I've Been Reading

Articles

1. Eight Years at GoDaddy (Part 1) and Part 2 — Jacob's write-up of leaving GoDaddy after eight years (eleven if you count the internships). Proud-dad link. Jacob is now at Quinn.

Article reading has otherwise gone quiet — four weeks of overlanding, satellite-limited connectivity, and evenings spent at the fire rather than a screen will do that.

Books

1. Finished Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré on 27 August — I needed some summary help to keep names and aliases and codenames straight. Highly recommend if you like your spy fiction more about people lying to themselves than gadgets.
2. I'm reading The Honourable Schoolboy now, the next in the George Smiley series after Tinker. Very good so far.

2. What I've Been Watching

Three movies on the long flight over, all new to me:

1. Michael — Antoine Fuqua's Michael Jackson biopic, with his nephew Jaafar Jackson in the lead.
2. It Was Just an Accident — Jafar Panahi's Palme d'Or winner. Former Iranian political prisoners debate what to do with a man they think tortured them. Grim and very good.
3. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die — Gore Verbinski sci-fi comedy, Sam Rockwell recruiting diner regulars to fight a rogue AI. Knowingly ridiculous, and the source of some good conversation with the Africa crew.

3. What I've Been Listening To

Guitar is on pause for the trip — I ordered one to be delivered to our Johannesburg hotel but the courier didn't deliver as promised. Would have been nice to keep the practice routine up (and have it for campfires). Also, we don't listen to music in the vehicle when overlanding and there hasn't been much tar road driving of late. Plenty of great conversations.

4. Dispatches from Africa

Johannesburg into Kruger — Vehicle pickup at Bushlore turned up a dead house battery, a broken air compressor, and no lighter for the propane stoves, but splitting the group to provision in parallel saved the timeline. Nine holes at Skukuza Golf Club — hippos and monkeys as hazards — and a leopard stalking impala on the drive to Berg-en-Dal.

The Lebombo Eco Trail — Four days of genuine 4x4 overlanding along the Mozambique border with a national park guide and a caravan of strangers who became a crew. Two spotted hyenas jogging up the road at golden hour, a few vehicle recoveries from mud, and the realization that a 2x teleconverter needs a tripod to be worth anything. Chocolate cake in a dutch oven, improving with practice.

Return to Pafuri and Baobab Hill House — Second visit for us, fourth for Ken and Tenya. A great respite after the long driving days up the Lebombo.

Birds of Kruger and Mammals of Kruger — Photo essays: 35+ lifer birds in Kruger alone, PhotoLoupe (my own app) doing real work on species ID and organization. The Secretarybird shot doesn't meet my usual bar but it was too long-sought to leave out.

Three Border Crossings, 1 for 3 — South Africa → Zimbabwe → South Africa → Botswana. The first went sideways when a wide-turning lorry pushed us past the SA exit station with no stamp — which meant walking back across the Beitbridge bridge over the Limpopo to fix it, over an hour lost to a shift change that shut processing down entirely. The Botswana crossing, by contrast, was a breeze.

Gonarezhou National Park, Zimbabwe — Opens with an Edward Abbey quote about paving the wilderness, part of the appeal of this hard-to-reach national park. A three-hour drive stretched toward six, a gate (Boli) that exists on no map but the official park PDF, and a late-night arrival only possible because Ken already had a WhatsApp line open to a park staffer from a prior mix-up.

Lone Tree Wilderness Camp at Tswehe — A stopover at Mapesu, a detour through Mapungubwe National Park (klipspringer, a one-way rocky 4x4 descent, lunch at the confluence of three countries), then 20km of off-road into a proper glamping camp with a pool-side hide. Wild dogs ran past camp one evening — I missed it, but our first-timers didn't.

Khama Rhino Sanctuary — The redemption arc: in 2024 we struck out on both rhinos and secretarybirds. This time, fifteen minutes into the first game drive, a black rhino in the bush — better views than last time, plus white rhinos out on the open plains, including a mother and calf we sat with for a long while.

Birds Part 2 — More photo essay: a Golden-breasted Bunting visiting the Tswehe pool hide like clockwork at 5pm, oxpeckers that look faker than they are, and Southern Cordonbleu — known locally as blue waxbills — that never get old despite being everywhere.

Cruising the Okavango Delta — An open day in Maun turned into a boat trip into the delta's NG-32 concession fingers: close-approach elephants feeding in the water weeds, a pool of hippos, 30+ birds tracked (none new, all welcome). The bittersweet part: this was the last stop for four of the crew — Scott, Jeanne, Tenya, and Julie flew out to Cape Town the next day, leaving just Ken, Karen, and me to roam Zimbabwe and back into Botswana.

Nata Bird Sanctuary — Said goodbye to Warthog, our Land Cruiser, at Bushlore in Maun, then the three of us headed east on the A3 (genuinely being repaved this time, not just patched) to Nata Lodge. The bird sanctuary we visited in 2024 was transformed — white pelicans and lesser flamingos that stuck around well past breeding season thanks to the big rains — good for three lifers: Lesser Flamingo, Red-knobbed Coot, Cape Shoveler.

Zimbabwe Part 2 — Matobo and Hwange National Parks — A dense one. The Plumtree border crossing (90 minutes, touts working the obfuscation). A ranger walk-up to two young white rhino bulls in Matobo — nine rhinos on the trip now, still chasing better lion luck — plus the Nswatugi Cave San rock paintings. Then the A8's "pothole trenches" to Hwange, a pan full of lionesses, and finding Trinity, an injured wild dog with three pups, which turned into a real moment with Painted Dog Conservation trackers who hadn't had eyes on her in over a year. Camp color: an elephant staring down our rooftop tent at Guvalala for hours, and a hard-to-watch hippo birth at Masuma Dam.

Victoria Falls — A 6am entry (itinerary optimized with an assist from Claude) bought solitude and good early birding — Trumpeter Hornbills and, with Karen's help, a Schalow's Turaco. $58/person entry, and a reminder that Zimbabwe wants its USD cash pristine, no tears or excess folds. Free bonus: walking across the gorge bridge into Zambia without a passport stamp.

5. What I'm Attempting

Weather forced a reroute. Cold, rainy, wind at Khama pushed us into Maun a day early — worked out fine, turned into a resupply day and a boat cruise into the Okavango Delta before heading back out.

Birding target-list housekeeping. With four weeks of sightings in hand, did a full reconciliation of every remaining target list against my actual eBird history — not just this trip, but going back to a 2024 Africa trip too. Turned up birds already ticked but still showing as "targets" because of naming drift between the SABAP2 data source and current eBird/Merlin taxonomy (Crimson-breasted Gonolek vs. Crimson-breasted Shrike, Cut-throat vs. Cut-throat Finch, and so on), plus one genuine taxonomic trap: Barlow's Lark and Dune Lark are now considered the same species, so Namibia's itinerary doesn't need two separate stops to bag them both.

Ahead: CKGR, then the west side of the Okavango Delta, Tsodilo Hills, then into Namibia.

That's it from the waterhole. Next month's will likely be from the Joberg airport as I prepare to return home.

-Chris