Up to this point, the term "safari camp" was not one that filled me with a great deal of fondness, given our experience at the eclipse camp. As we climbed into the Botswana sky, I was picturing another week of sleeping on a hard steel prison-style bunk, mediocre chow, Spartan conditions, and just a lot less gentility than I like from my vacation dollar (especially six thousand of them). When we touched down out in the middle of nowhere on a wide spot of dirt with "runway markers" made from strips of white corrugated tin laid on the ground, I was wistfully wishing for a flood or something that would force us to return to the Vic Falls Lodge.

OK, so I'm not right all the time.

The good folks at Camp Moremi really saw me coming, and they knew how to deal with my type. In general, the camps in Botswana turned out to be great, but Moremi was the unquestioned high point of the trip, let me just get that out of the way at the top.

We were greeted at the airstrip by a new set of local guides with their familiar bush jeeps, and by David, the manager of the camp. OK, now I'm jumping ahead again here, but let me go on about this guy for a second. Think of the great BBC TV series "Fawlty Towers," with John Cleese as the comically nasty, inept hotel manager Basil Fawlty. Got that? Now think of the anti-Basil, an immediately-likable, charming, witty individual who seems to be a born host, who is not only good...nay, great at his job, but actually gives you the impression he enjoys doing it. OK, so David wasn't all that, but near as, dammit. In a world where fewer and fewer people seem to give a hoot about their job any more, just the mere fact of a person in charge who seemed to like his work and was good at it to boot is enough to make Camp Moremi a must-visit. Unfortunately, he's not the regular manager, so my whole rant here kinda falls down. But I digress...

Later in the drive, we came back around that way, and the lion was right side up. We got even closer this time, but the lion just didn't give a fig about us, he was fed and lazy, and he couldn't recognize us in the jeep as People McNuggets. Also, he was busy socializing. Every once in awhile, he would roar out a "song," a sequence of decreasing-length roars that Cal said was his way of locating other lions in the area.

Click here to hear the lion
calling his buddies.

Near the end of the drive, when it was rapidly starting to get dark, we caught a brief sight of our first giraffe.

And the facilities in the camp. Wow. To call the accommodations "tents" is to do them a great disservice. Although tents they are, you'd scarcely know it without looking closely. They are built up on permanent, raised wood platforms, and are easily as large as any hotel room, with real beds (indeed, very good beds) and other furniture inside. Indeed, they are really indistinguishable from a "real" room from the inside. Each room has a viewing deck with chairs where you can sit out and watch the wildlife, and a rather luxurious bathroom. The bathrooms are separate from the rooms, but only across a short space on the deck, and reasonably safe to cross even at night. The rooms and bathrooms have two electric light systems, one that runs off the camp generator when it's on, and a second, smaller set that runs off batteries and is available 24 hours a day. The tap water in the camp is perfectly safe to drink.

Pam and I got to our room to find our luggage already there. On one of the tables was a water carafe that had ice---ice! in it, and a jar of fresh, still-warm macaroons. Not for the last time that day, I said to myself "oh, yeah. I'm gonna like it here."

The people at Moremi were not only more attentive to our comfort, but our safety as well. We were warned not to walk the paths between the rooms and the dining room after dark, an escort would come around and collect us as a group. In retrospect, I think all that walking between the room and the boma after dark that I did back in the Zimbabwe camp was probably pretty dangerous. The escorts at Moremi were armed only with powerful flashlights, guns being another thing not allowed in the wildlife preserves. The doors on the rooms and bathroom had no keyed locks, but had turn-bolts, and we were told to always lock them when we weren't in the room. The monkeys had learned how to work the door handles, and could get in and make quite a mess but they hadn't figured out the bolts...yet.