Day 15 part 1- or the day we could have pet the lions

Up early for our first land Safari in Botswana inside Chobe National Park. We started out slow but soon came upon a lioness carrying a cub. She dropped her cub in the middle of the trail! The poor cub was so little and so tired, he could hardly walk. The cub was less than 2 weeks old and was soon crying for his mama. Our guide told us that the mother lion was moving several cubs from one location to another to keep them away from the males. If a male suspects the cub is not his, he will kill it. We stayed for several minutes and got some amazing pictures.....more to come on this part of the story. We drove on and soon came upon 3 male lions. One was a dominant male and had wounds on his face from recent fighting. We watched for several minutes as they lounged around (lions can sleep up to 20 hours per day). Soon the big male got up and started moving and then started to roar, he called several times but we didn’t hear any reply. Our guide repositioned the Jeep and the cat calmly walked right beside me, I could have reached out to touch him!!!! So many Jeep’s arrived so we moved on down towards the river. We saw many of the same animals as last night on our river cruise. We did add several species of birds to our list (see below). We turned away from the river and soon we saw elephants, elephants, more elephants and baby elephants. I have video of one group walking single file down towards the river. Beth was over the moon, to date she has taken 3000+ pictures. We will have a curated collection soon after we get home. We stopped for a light snack and a beverage and then headed out of the park. The guide was looking for the mother lioness and we arrived at the spot were the cub had been. We soon spotted the cub, in the shade under a tree, sleeping. We passed him and about 50 yards further down the trail we spotted the mother and she walked right past our jeep. Beth could have reached out to touch her. I have video of her walking back to retrieve her cub. I have run out of superlatives to our days here in Africa, so Beth and I came up with “Afrimagnamazing”! To describe this morning. We got back to the lodge, had breakfast and walked around town. We found the post office and bought some souvenirs. We lounged by the pool for awhile and went back to the room to shower and rest for our afternoon Safari. During our rest we heard a bunch of thumping on our ceiling, turns out the staff was chasing monkeys with slingshots and they crossed our lodge roof on the way to safety....Please read part 2 for the rest of day 15.