Gaborone Game Reserve (Park)

Ted: The kids and I spent several hours at the Gaborone Game Reserve (GGR) on Tuesday, August 19th. We were greatly surprised at the variety, number and quality of the animals we saw there. We saw several species for the first time. First some background: Gaborone was selected as the capital city for Botswana in the mid 1960s when they gained their independence from the British. At the time, Gaborone was barely a town. They pretty much started from scratch to build a capital, parks included. The GGR was sited along the Notwane River in 1978. It is very small by any Africa game preserve/reserve standards - only 5 square kilometers or 1250 acres - but it is on the edge of town and 15 minutes from our flat. Their goal was to provide a place were local folks could see animals native to the area. From their brochure, "A large number of people from Gaborone, both adults and school children, never see wildlife in its natural habitat". It is open every day, cheap (about $5 for all of us) and we get to use our own Toyota Corrolla as our safari vehicle.

We were there for about 3 hours but ran out of battery on my camera after the first 30 minutes. It is just one large fenced area with roads, a couple of picnic areas and the vacant Visitor Center (picture above). We drove up and down, across the roadways all looking in different directions going, "oh, look there. oo, over there... ohmygosh, look at that one". During our entire time (during the day on a weekday) we saw no more than a total of 5 other vehicles - otherwise, just us lost in the wild. For those in Fort Wayne, it was an super-sized African Velt at the Zoo, except in your own car. The most common animals we saw were Impala, Warthogs and Vervet monkeys. Lots of Kudu and Ostrich.

The Vervets let us get pretty close with our vehicle. They went on with their day picking bugs from trees and caring for their young. The monkeys were sometimes no more than 5 feet outside our car window. Toward the end of our visit we stopped at a picnic area to stretch. After a couple of moments, a family of Vervets piled out of a nearby tree and began moving toward us. They just kept walking toward us (I think they are used to picnickers tossing them food), the male first followed by the females and tailed by the babies. After I realized they were as tall as Trey (and Trey has no fear) we decided to get back in the car. It ended with us running and giggling/dropping the keys, screams of, "Daddy, daddy, they're still coming" and slamming doors all around.



Some of our firsts included the rare Hyrax (below, left of the water well. They are the only living mammal related to the elephant),





Zebra, Wildebeast (below photo, but very far away), and Thessape (a long-horned type of antelope).



We saw a monitor lizard and all kind of birds.


The Warthogs were sometimes alarming. The park has no predators, so they grow big. One, I swear, was as big as a small pony. Several mom warthogs with 2-3 young. Eden and Hope thought they were pretty cute at that age.


We plan to go back soon and often, next times with fully charged camera and more apples and toys for Trey. We will likely eat our food in the car...