Zambia Safari

April 19

The last 2 days we had in Zambia were filled with activities. We went on 2 game drives and 1 animal walk (subject of the last post). Corrie and Glenn went on a fishing trip on the Zambezi River and I went on a night safari to see how many nocturnal animals we could find.

We started off with a 5:00 wake up call and 5:30 breakfast with the sunrise for a view.

Since the river is high we had to take the boat to the Toyota Land Cruisers.

We then got into the Land Cruisers and started traveling around the park. We found many impalas running and fighting.

The scenery in Zambia is beautiful and served as encouragement for me to put God’s African landscape ideas into my garden.

We ran into several Baobab trees and our guide told me some interesting things about it. It has the largest trunk of any tree in Africa. It is a monocot not a dicot. That means it doesn’t have a cambium layer like other trees; it has vascular bundles like grasses. So elephants can’t kill it like other trees. The trunks are hollow so leopards and snakes hide inside.

The Baobab tree also has epiphytes growing on its branches. They weren’t blooming but they looked like orchids.

Another interesting tree we saw was the Strangler Fig. It is a vine that grows up another tree and takes it over. The parent tree eventually dies and the Strangler Fig becomes the tree.