Gaborone

With our flight leaving in the evening and our trip to Lion's Resort being done we had earmarked the afternoon to visit Gaborone the capital city of Botswana.

The Game City mall is a large mall complex in the south of the city. We had a quick walk through here to find somewhere for lunch. Be careful taking photos in here, the security guys aren't fans of that and did tell Thomas off. 

As I write this there's a meme going viral where Americans not familiar with the phrase are questioning what a Brit means when they say they're going for a "Cheeky Nando's". This is very appropriate for us because that's exactly what we got up to in the mall. Nando's is a South African food chain that specialises in grilled chicken covered in Peri Peri sauce and it's popular in the UK but there are no branches in Germany so we agreed we had to take Thomas for a cheeky Nando's. 

In the UK we have macho peas as my favourite side. That's not on the menu here in Botswana so instead I had peri peri spinach, local to the country, which was so tasty. 

From the mall we took a taxi, driven by a great chap called Max who drove us to the Parliament building for the start of a quick walking tour of the city. He was so happy to have Europeans in his car and was a very personable driver.

A rather peculiar building, this is the Parliament Building. I'm wondering if the number of arches has any relevance but I can't find much online.

Tal was eyeing up the plants particularly the aloe vera plants which have a high value back in the UK.  If he starts making frequent trips out here you know what's up.

A couple of monuments. 

A nice mural on the side of one of many ministry buildings that surround the parliament building.

Rather depressing the UK embassy was built like a fort with a concrete defence system surrounding the building. 

We took a walk through the shopping area and the place was a ghost town. This was by far the quietest capital city I'd ever visited. Bimbo's made the Brits laugh. (For those that don't know it's a term given to a dumb blonde).

Continuing to walk East we came across a museum which we thought we'd explore. 

An original Rhodesian train carriage. (Now Zimbabwe)

This part of the country has undergone quite a lot of name changes. Botswana used to be called Bechuanaland. Like the renaming I saw in India it looks like traces of Britain's colonisation in the past is slowly being removed. That's not a bad thing. 

Random stuffed animals.

We have these in the UK too and I'm not a fan. These guys must be raking in a fortune and never seem to mention where the money really goes...their pockets I suspect.

Warning, manhole missing. If it wasn't for that well placed branch I might have fallen in.

We finished the little walking tour at the city stadium. Unfortunately there was no football on today and the building stood empty. So we gave Max a call (we decided to keep him) and he then took us back to the airport.

Having been to South Africa before it was nice to visit Botswana and claim a new country on the trip (something I like to try to do every time I travel). The airport was quite small and there wasn't much to do whilst we waited for the little prop plane that would fly us back to Joburg for our final day.

No, thankyou!

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