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Dan is piled amongst the luggage, while Merrie sits right behind the pilot. Fortunately the flight to Xigera was just a few minutes.

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Dan enjoys first class (aka the only class, since there were only four seats not counting the pilot and the pile of luggage).

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The views from the planes were quite impressive and very telling about the landscape and the Okavango Delta in general. The planes flew low, so we could occasionally see elephants from the air.

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Here we are at Xigera, enjoying a cool drink and a hippo skull.

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This one is a little hard to parse, I know, but was sufficiently interesting to include here. We watched a snake eagle grab a snake (as they are wont to do) and hang out on this branch, snake dangling below him, waiting for it to die. We are, FYI, watching all this from a slowly-moving boat.

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I know, I know... more elephant pictures? But this one is new, because we're seeing him from the water, not from a truck.

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This also gave us an opportunity to get close to the water birds, like this purple heron.

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When the boat cranked up to full speed, the reeds smacked us pretty hard. Merrie takes cover here.

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We enjoyed a sunset out on the water, watching the nesting birds.

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There were probably a few thousand African darters on this little tiny island.

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A fish eagle flies overhead. We also saw quite a few of these at Xigera.

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Dan poses in the mokoro canoe. In fact this part of the trip was a little slow, since in fact the guides moved the canoe, not us, and even then we couldn't really get anywhere very quickly. But better not to have guests standing up in moving boats, since there were both hippo and crocodiles in the area.

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This is a shot from our flatboat the next morning, as we head through the narrow paths carved among the reeds. This was the last day of the year that anyone would get to go out here, since the water was down to a couple inches in some spots. And hiding among these reeds is the shy and very rare sitatunga antelope, which we _almost_ saw (we saw one just darting away). That would have been quite lucky; people spend months fruitlessly trying to find a sitatunga.

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An open-billed stork takes to the air...

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...and flies away to look for new hunting grounds.

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This malachite kingfisher, who let us get quite close, was one of the most colorful birds we saw in Botswana, maybe second only to the lilac-breasted roller.

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An adorable baby red lechwe having a snack.

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This is not a great view of a hippo, but is about as great a view as one would want from a boat. Probably twenty feet away.

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This crocodile was doing what crocodiles typically do: nothing whatsoever for hours - or sometimes months - at a time.

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A male lechwe watches over his herd of females.

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See that lump? Sure you do, because I took a picture of it and posted it on the Web, but as we cruised by it seemed much less obvious that this was in fact a hippo. This is precisely why hippos kill more humans than any animal in Africa: if you didn't see this guy and let your canoe/boat/whatever get a little too close, he would look less like a lump and more like the two-ton monster that he is.

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A young male lechwe learns from an older male.

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A great egret takes off right next to our boat.

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This buffalo feels about us exactly the way it looks: he's somewhat annoyed that we're interrupting his grazing and is a little unsure whether to bother making noises at us or not.

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Merrie's first-person canoe view.

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Dan's first-person canoe-view.

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The painted reed frogs came out in the evenings.

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Dan's face, just like this box of insect repellent, says DOOOOOM. We really didn't have any problems with bugs in Bostwana and never had occasion to open this rather severely-labeled box.

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This stick bug was just hanging out on the dinner table.

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A typical morning: have some coffee (hot water lasts all night in a big metal thermos) and look out at the water birds and red lechwe we could see from our porch in Xigera.

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This was right in our camp; a small sand pit was how we could tell who had visited overnight. Last night, some hyena.

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The little bee-eater was another of Xigera's more picturesque birds.

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Xigera had a few more zebra than Chitabe, like this one, who is looking cautiously in our direction.

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A nice view of a male impala.

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Another elephant... elephants were less common in Xigera than in Chitabe, but still around.

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Another lilac-breasted roller. When they let us get close, we snapped away.

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The remains of a giraffe carcass, probably killed a few days earlier.

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Dan poses with some elephant dung, which was EVERYWHERE. It was actually pretty incredible how much elephants impacted the landscape, more in terms of tree destruction than in terms of dung, but there was indeed plenty of the latter. Not as gross as you'd think, though... elephant dung is super dry and didn't affect the air too much.

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Dan and Merrie pose on the truck during a morning coffee stop.

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Merrie sleeps peacefully, not knowing that a 10,000 pound animal is just a few feet away. Dan is taking this picture from outside the tent, on the other side. A few minutes later there would be no "other side", since the elephants completely surrounded our tent for a bit, preventing us from leaving.

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While we pretty much avoided technology, Dan allowed himself one or two episodes of Tivo'd Law and Order on his iPod over morning coffee.

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This adorable baby hyena was one of the highlights of Xigera for us.

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Doesn't he look like too cute to be real?

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A vervet monkey climbs up over our camp.

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This tsessebe antelope has no intention of getting out of our way.

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Two male lechwe practice sparring. This is a bachelor herd; they're not fighting over girls, just practicing so they're ready when it is time to fight over girls.

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A baboon poses nicely atop a termite mound.

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This is the Xigera airport in its entirety. A large sign and a windsock. Here we're on our way out, headed for Duma Tau.