Thursday
A 7am start from Linda's Lodge. The road from Chimoio to Inchope is fine but from Inchope north we were back on the dreaded EN1, more pothole than road and you're lucky if you progress faster than 20kms per hour.
Over the Pungwe River Bridge and we finally arrived at Chitengo Camp in Gorongosa National Park.
Development of this park over the last 20 years or so has been fully supported by foreign donations. Facilities are greatly improved since our last visit over 10 years ago.
They don't allow self driving in Gorongosa so we all went out on an afternoon game drive. It was cloudy, cold and a bit drizzly; weather brought in by the cold fronts that has caused wide spread snow in South Africa earlier in the week. Not the best weather for ideal game viewing or bird watching.
We had an awesome camp fire built by the catapult-wielding anti- baboon guard, Antonio.
Our Friday evening drive was even colder and just when we were about to braai the rain started.
Deirdre and Team Prado did a great job cooking beef fillet on the gas; all of us huddled under their awning.
It rained most of Saturday. We took over the conference room and watched the rugby on Rina's laptop- enjoying lots of lunchtime wine to drown our sorrows- caused by the All Black's win as well as the weather.
I couldn't cook Moroccan tagine on the fire in the rain so we decided to eat dinner in the restaurant. By 2pm the sun came out and the game drive was just beautiful. The plains support thousands and thousands of waterbuck.
This is a magical park even if our big game sightings were hampered by poor weather.
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