Short trip to the big five / Zimbabwe part 1

Second day in Zimbabwe

The second day in Zimbabwe was not only driven by a game drive, but we had the opportunity to visit a community nearby the camp. Of course, you are driving also through the wilderness on the way to the community and on such a short trip you take any opportunity to photograph animals.

A different perspective on hunting

In addition, I had a very interesting discussion with one of the guides about hunting elephants. In Europe, this is seen as very negative. Talking with people who live in the area you get additional perspectives. On the one hand side, the elephants can only move within the national park. There are too many they dramatically destroy nature, as Elephants have to feed themself. Therefore it makes sense to control the population, as we do, by shooting old elephants. On the other side, the communities are getting 20.000€ for each elephant. With this money, a community is able to build a well, which makes life much easier. The guide was for a controlled way to shoot the elephants as he was also afraid that otherwise the elephants are only shot due to the ivory.

Unfortunately, two days are passing by very fast and after a lot of amazing moments and endless time to observe amazing wildlife it was time to move on. We left Hwange national park and the wonderful camp Linkwasha and flew via Victoria waterfalls and Maun to the Okavango Delta in Botswana. And believe it or not, the Okavango delta was even more impressive than the Hwange national park. This will be part of the next entry. For now, I leave you with one of my favourite lion images I took in the Hwange national park.

Second part of the trip you find in my next blog articles “Short trip to the big five / Botswana part 2″