Taking off from Livingstone airport around 2pm, the four aircrafts overflew the Zambezi river at low level all the way down to Kasane airport in Botswana, as a curiosity this airport lies on the 750m lenght of border between Zambia and Botswana. Customs cleared in Kasane and the TAA09 team took off inbound the Okavango Delta to Xarakai, the closest airstrip of Mapula Lodge. Just after take off we overflew the Chobe National Park followed the Moremi National Park and for a few moments we overflew the airspace of Namibia. A huge amount of wild animals were spotted on both parks, as lions, zebras, girafes, hippos, elephants, kudus, crocodiles, rhinos, etc. As we approached the strip in the middle of nowhere at sunset time and due to communication problems with Mapula Lodge, we were not able to advise the Lodge that we would arrive at that time, and as soon as we approached the strip we noticed that nobody was there waiting for the TAA09 entourage. As soon as two aircrafts were landed, we advised the pilots Eduardo Maya and Carlos Fernandes, still in the air, to look out for the lodge near the strip. They saw something that seemed a lodge and they overflew it for 5 minutes performing 360's overhead. During our approach we noticed around 60 elephants just side by side with the airstrip...
With all the aircrafts on the ground and the night coming, we applied all our bush pilots course knowledge and we started grab bush in order to make a circle with a fire in the middle to proctect ourselves of the wild animals, as we didn't know if someone will picked us up there. Suddenly, we saw two Land Rovers from Mapula Lodge coming in and all of the team smiled!!! An adventure of two fantastic nights were about to start...
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