Maun, Botswana to Etosha, Namibia 3-7 August 08

We passed from Botswana into Namibia the day after we left the Delta but didn’t leave the foot and mouth hassle behind. It’s a real problem in Botswana, to the point that they’ve built what is known as the “Buffalo Fence” - a very solid fence that stretches for some 3000km to separate the buffalo from the farmed cattle in an attempt to keep the disease at bay. Elephants and giraffe can step over the fence, which is about 1.3m high, and antelope etc can easily jump it. All through Botswana there are foot and mouth checks where all vehicles have to stop, have the wheels sprayed, all passengers have to get off carrying whatever additional footwear they have and dip the soles in a solution. All a bit of a hoohah and adds a lot of time to journeys, particularly when you have to do this 3-4 times a day! Sometimes, the guys get on and want to see whats in the chili bins to make sure we’re not carrying cheese, meat, yogurt etc.



The first three nights we had in Namibia were all bush camps. Namibia is a pretty cool country I’ve decided. Large open expanses of land, very few people, loads of animals, desert, hills, mountains, massive sand dunes, an unforgiving coastline and long long straight roads that are pretty much empty of traffic. Brilliant.



Bush camping is fun to a point but it is very cold at night now and getting more so the further south we head, and it really depends on where we set up camp. The first night it was in a clearing off the road and there was loads of wood around for a fire, flat spaces for the tents, minimal thorns on the ground (they pierce through the tent base and into whatever you’re sleeping on), not too many acacia trees to walk into in the night (the thorns on these are about 3 inches long, but elephants still eat them) and out of sight from the road. There were noises in the night but we’re over that now and just figured that it was donkeys crashing round in the bush. There are a lot of donkeys wandering round in Botswana and Namibia and they’re a real pain on the roads. We’ve had a few near misses but the only casualty thus far has been a duck.



We had a long drive into the desert and a fair few kilometres down a sand track before we reached the home of a large tribe of San people. The truck got bogged in the sand on the way in so there was a mass eviction and a lot of digging before it bounced through the ruts about 2 tonne lighter to where we were setting up camp in the sand.



The San people are amazing. If you’ve ever seen that movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, they’re just like the African folk in that. I was absolutely entranced by the way they spoke and could have listened to them for hours and hours. Their language has so many clicks and clocks and it was beautiful to listen to and they were such tiny tiny people! This is Kate (not me) who is about 5’3” and the guy she is talking to is one of the San men.





These guys are so lean but have big round bottoms



and the kids are just gorgeous.




Their hair is so coarse and the babies hair grows in rows like a crop of corn. The hair is like little coarse hard tufts and when you touch it, its really hard – almost like ridges. You can see that it doesn’t really change as they grow older from these guys in the photo below. These guys were still quite young



but this chap is much older and his hair has gone a bit fluffy



I sat with the women for a while but they don’t speak English and are very very shy so its difficult to communicate. I felt (and looked) gigantic next to them but when one of the guys, a huge 6’3” chap from Somerset held one of the babies (who was loving every minute of being enveloped in this giants arms) he absolutely dwarfed the wee kid who laughed and laughed with a gummy toothless smile.



Back on the main road, we stopped for lunch and were over run with curious kids, all dressed for school. We started a game of cricket and there were some mean batters and wicket keepers among them. This chap on a donkey was cute and he’d taken his shoes off and tied them to the donkeys bridle. I watched them for a while and the donkey was clearly long suffering but patiently putting up with an awful lot.



A full days drive took us to just outside the Etosha National Park where we camped up on the side of the road for the night. It wasn’t a pleasant camp side as literally only meters off the road in the gravel but it was incredibly flat and the road was so straight, you could see car headlights for about 5 minutes before they passed by. I don’t know how cold it was that night but it felt super cold but there wasn’t a frost on the ground in the morning. I think it’s the extreme temperature changes that make it seem colder than it actually is - either that or we're all soft as!

Okavango Delta, Botswana 1-3 August 08

It probably sounds a bit stupid but I’d never really thought about what the Okavango Delta was about until we actually got there. In case you haven't either, the Okavango River starts in central Angola and runs 1430km down through Namibia before hitting Botswana. The water hits the Kalahari desert and is swallowed up but not before it spreads out like a great fan across the flat landscape. The water branches and forms a 16000 square km maze of lagoons, channels and islands for a few months before drying up completely only for the cycle to begin again the next year.

The waters were still rising when we were there and in places were up to mid-calf and others well over our heads. The only way round is by mokoros (wooden canoes) and on arrival, we met our poler who would stay with us for two days. Obe is a 28 year old Motswana (not sure why people from Botswana are called Motswana but…!) who had grown up on the delta and had a wonderful way of talking. A slow drawl where his yes seemed to turn into a very deep “yyyyyyis”.



The mokoros are carved from a solid tree trunk, commonly sausage trees but Amarula trees are also used. More and more mokoros are being made from fibreglass in an attempt to be more environmentally friendly. Apparently the trees need to be 8m tall and 1.5m in circumference (about 80 years old) for the mokoros and the one we had was very unstable, sat very low in the water and leaked quite badly. Us and our luggage were piled into this mokoro and we set off with the water about 1cm from the edge of the mokoro. Lying down is easiest and its incredibly peaceful to be poled along through the reeds along channels that you’d never know were channels. This is the view we had from the mokoro.



These ladies were taking a rest from transporting all our gear (tents, pots, pans, food etc)



On our way into the Delta Obe spotted elephants and as we were the last canoe, he headed us off to see if we could get closer. We did but we also got very stuck and Euan and I were sitting in the mokoro hauling us along by grabbing fistfuls of reeds and pulling as well as Obe frantically trying to pole from the end of the mokoro. It was great fun and certainly not for anyone who is anti bugs or frogs! I had a wee green frog hitching a ride on my leg for most of the way.

We were camping on an island and out tent was pitched right on the edge of the water, away from all the other tents and we had a fantastic view.



Euan has taken the bush camping and lack of showers to heart and is starting to look like something out of the wild. Washing in the Delta its OK as there is semi-fresh water but its not really good for shaving (or so he says!).



We spent two nights in the Delta and it was just brilliant but man was it hot and there were killer mozzies in there too. I caught two biting me through two layers - a t-short plus a merino jumper. The water still had a way to rise and there was still a lot of grass out of the water which made some of the delta just look like a big dry patch of grass at times but the polers moving smoothly through on the mokoros gave it away.



There were some pools that had no hippo or crocs and we could safely swim in these and also have a go at poling. Euan was actually quite good at it, both in the canals and in open water.



I on the other hand was pretty terrible. OK in the canals but once in open water, the mokoro went round in cirles (fast). The one time I did go out into the open channels I had passengers (Euan and one other fully dressed kiwi girl) and I went in before I flooded the mokoro so badly we all ended up in the drink and had to save the mokoro from sinking. It was quite funny but I wasn’t allowed near the pole again.

We did a few game walks while in the Delta and thus far on all the game walks we've done, we’ve been lucky enough to always come across something. One even we came across two elephants that were tussling and our guides wouldn’t let us any nearer than below, so we were definitely too close to those that we were stalking at Flatdogs Camp in Luangwa!



We stuck pretty close to the termite mound (which are all apparently build facing west) and no, I’m not posing despite what it looks like. I had no idea Euan was taking the picture.



We came across a herd of about 50 zebra who spooked after we’d passed them and galloped in a big circle. It wasn’t until we got back to camp that we found out that the other group was in the middle of the circle as the zebra galloped around them. They said it was one of the most amazing and almost scary experiences they’d had since being on the trip.

Another evening we headed off to see hippos in a deeper pool nearby. They were so funny, bobbing their heads up and down every few minutes like periscopes, checking us out. Then they’d come a little nearer, bob up, look at us with their beady little eyes, pop down again and edge closer. They got a bit too close for comfort so we glided off.



The water in the Delta will apparently stop rising around the end of August but by then, most of the grass that you can see in the photos will be underwater. Elephant poo doesn’t float and you can see big piles of it underwater. The elephants carve huge tracks through the Delta, from island to island and they stick to these tracks. Something about any who get separated from the group knowing which tracks to take. Having been in the Delta and trying to pole through the canals, some of which don’t look like canals at all, I’d get hopelessly lost. The flight that we took on the day we left the Delta showed the number of canals and vast expanse of water to get lost in.

The flight was an experience in itself. Our English pilot had a bit of an attitude. I asked early on where he was from (Dorset) and a few minutes later he followed up with a commentary about how he was entirely fed up with being asked where he was from, did he always dream of doing this as a little boy, what was his name and so on. Idiot. Anyhow, we were a chirpy bunch of five and he said “Oh, a lively group so a lively ride". We didn’t realise he was a bit of a gung ho pilot and a short while into the flight I wondered if he was having employer issues and was beyond caring if he got sacked. Charlotte wondered if he was a failed RAF jet pilot with a grudge. Either which way, he was doing things he should never have been doing having just told us that he wasn’t allowed to circle or dive bomb animals and was meant to be maintaining 500ft!

The Delta from the air is impressive and, with the waters still rising, will only become more so. The water had risen the two days we were there and was almost sitting (it was very very still water and didn’t lap at all) at the door of our tent when we packed it up. You're never believe that the below is mostly water.



This shot shows the mokoro tracks and termite mounds still above water.



Something odd the pilot did was fly incredibly low over some of the water. So low in fact, that the wheels were running through the water. It was great fun until it went on a tad too long and I really thought he had a problem with the plane and started to s*hit myself. He flew like this a few times and at the end of one pool, took the plane vertical up to over 500ft then banked hard right. My stomach was still close down by the pool.



By the end of the flight, we’d seen so many animals, albeit from a height. Great herds of buffalo, countless giraffe, elephants, zebra etc and it would have been great to stay up there but my feet were so sweaty from the aerobatics that I didn’t think I could take any more stunt work and was kind of glad when we saw the runway.

Kasana to Maun, Botswana 30 July – 1 August 08

We left Zambia and headed into Botswana on a barge over the Zambezi river and the difference between countries was immediately obvious. Botswana has done well out of diamonds in the past and a lot of money has obviously been pumped into the infrastructure. The roads were good, well signposted etc and the towns were relatively tidy. Botswana was quickly renamed Flatswana – not a hill in sight, lots of low growing scrub, dry dusty land and hours and hours of flat straight roads. We spent one night in a camp near Kasana and spent that evening on a boat on the Chobe river looking at wildlife.

A chillybin (ice boxes if you’re a Brit, cooler if you’re American and eskis if you’re an Aussie……. I think!) came on board, much to the amusement/horror of the Germans that were on the boat with us, and we spent about three hours cruising up to elephants, buffalo, hippo, crocs, kudu, baboons etc. Boats seem less intrusive than a vehicle although many of the animals don’t seem to care either way



but the elephants and hippos certainly let you know if you’re too close!



We spent a long time watching a herd of elephants fooling round in the mud – very comical to watch them as they’re so big and clumsy. Once they’re down you don’t think they’re going to make it back up!





There were a couple of bulls fooling round, pushing each other, crunching heads and, as one of my team members at work used to say (referring to others who we worked with), testing to see who had the “biggest swinging d*ck”



The river was very wide and dotted with islands of grass where elephants, hippos and crocodiles lay or grazed.

We had a long long days drive through to Maun and while the scenery was rather dull, animal spotting is always a great way to pass the time. Maun was a strange place with big signs up prohibiting residents from driving on Fri-Sun between the hours of 1800-0000…. Quite why we’re not too sure but apparently noone heeds the rule. Goats were wandering freely through the shopping centre, music blared from huge loud speakers in front of a supermarket and, all in all, it was a very eclectic place. Because we were heading into the Okavango Delta for a few nights of bush camping, about ½ of us who were cooking had to make sure we had everything we needed foodwise. The rest went to stock up on alcohol the price of which, because of the president going teetotal, was going to rise by 70% the next day. The camp we stayed had a croc farm as a neighbour and as a result, one side was bordered by a 18-wire electric fence. Serious security and serious shock if anyone walked into it in the night! This camp was run by two Kiwis chaps from way deep down in the South Island. It was a short stay in Maun but we're back here in two nights time.


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