Central and Southern Botswana: The Charm of the Kalahari

Antananarivo, November 16

By now, the delay between travel and posting about that travel has lengthened to almost two months.  I really must get better at this!  Since the travels in Botswana written about in this post, Terri and I have been back to South Africa, worked briefly in Greece, raced through the Balkans in a high-speed country-bagging tour and flown to Madagascar, where we will be until late December.  This post, however, is about the second half of our month in magical Botswana in late September.

48th birtday feast in Maun--thanks Terri!

After my birthday celebrations on September 13^th, we spent two more days in Maun, largely closeted in our room at Laphroaig Cottages, resting, reading and doing administrative tasks.  We picked up Stanley from Mike’s repair shop, his 4WD working again after several days of hard work by Mike and his mechanics.  The problem (luckily) was not a broken gearbox, but rather mechanical issues inside the shifting system that moves the transmission from 2WD to 4WD high range and then into 4WD low range.  It had taken quite a while and lots of problem-solving , but when Mike and I took Stanley out for a test drive in some deep sand, it was good to see that all four wheels engaged and pulled us out easily. 

For the rest, I spent a lot of time reading two classic books about travel in Botswana:  The Lost World of the Kalahari, by Laurens van der Post, and Cry of the Kalahari, by Mark and Delia Owens.  I love doing my background reading before going somewhere, and both of these books are brilliantly written and got me excited about our upcoming adventures in the arid Kalahari. 

Bat-eared fox, one of the characteristic species of the Kalahari

Our first destination, towards which we set off on Friday, September 16^th after a particularly slothful departure from town, featured prominently in van der Post’s book, which tells the story of a trip in the mid-1950s to make a BBC documentary film looking for any of the San hunter-gatherers, the “Bushmen”, still living a traditional lifestyle deep in the sheltering sands of the Kalahari.  After a long, fruitless slog through the Okavango Delta looking for any traditional San there, battling with a film director who really, really didn’t want to be part of the project anymore, the expedition ended up visiting the Tsodilo Hills, where they didn’t find any San in residence, but did find one of the great collections of San rock paintings in southern Africa.  We were keen to see Tsodilo, particularly since we had been wowed by our previous encounters with San rock painting in the Matopo Hills and at Domboshawa in Zimbabwe.

The van der Post Panel at Tsodilo

It was a long, flat, slightly monotonous drive from Maun to Tsodilo, 420 km of pavement enlivened occasionally by slalom sections around the axle-breaking potholes that have developed in the asphalt over the years.  We headed southwest from Maun, then turned northwest along the western edge of the Okavango Delta.  Only 30 km south of the Namibian border, we turned left onto a surprisingly good dirt road.  After the tracks we had been on lately, it was a relief to be able to steam along at 60 km/h on recently-graded gravel without having to watch for the next massive pothole .  We had been in overgrazed cattle country all day, but we now started to see a few hints of wildlife:  a red-crested korhaan, lots of elephant dung and a couple of ostriches.  We crested a rise and saw the back of the hills rising above the surrounding plain, then stopped for our obligatory sunset toast beside the road.  We entered the site past a ticket gate that was unmanned, then made our way in the gathering dark to a campsite that seemed abandoned.  We were glad that we were self-sufficient in water, as there didn’t seem to be any running water.  The atmosphere under a starlit sky flecked with wisps of high, thin cloud was magical and timeless, and left us eager to explore further the next day.

Xuntae, our guide at Tsodilo

After a peaceful night’s sleep, we drove over to the foot of the hills the next day to see the paintings.  We found a tiny site museum and visitor’s centre with two Botswanan men sitting outside:  a burly Bantu man who was the ticket seller, and a slight, lighter-skinned San man Xuntae who was to be our guide.  We went for a walk with Xuntae and a couple of Dutch tourists around the site and fell in love with the rugged beauty of the surroundings and the haunted, melancholic paintings of a bygone age. 

Xuntae was the last San man living at Tsodilo; when he was a young boy growing up, his father had been the chief of the local San, and had taught him to hunt the wild animals that roamed the area:  kudu, steenbok, giraffe and their favourite, eland.  Now all the other San families had drifted away to other parts, and his own children had been taken away to attend school at a village 60 km to the south.  The Botswanan government, like the British colonial government and the South African settlers before them (and like other governments in the US, Canada and Australia, to name but a few) view hunter-gatherers as primitive peoples who must be brought into the embrace of modern civilization, and taking away San children to be educated away from their parents is remarkably similar to the efforts made by Canadian and Australian government to destroy indigenous culture by educating children of aboriginal communities in residential schools in order to break their cultural bonds with their parents.  

Tsodilo giraffes

The San, inheritors of the way of life lived by all humans until 10,000 years ago, genetically the root from which all the other branches of humanity have sprung over the millennia, are now a broken and disappearing culture, leaving only their paintings to remind us all of what has been lost over the past two centuries of outside intrusion, land-grabbing and warfare.  Xuntae was a quiet, dignified man who glowed with pride as he showed the ochre panels of kudu, elephants, rhinos, giraffes and people scattered across the rock faces of the massif.  He told us of the yearly gatherings of bands of San at Tsodilo that were still going on in his youth, when for a couple of months at the end of the dry season they would gather to use the life-giving springs hidden among the rocky defiles, to hunt eland, and to dance late into the night around their campfires. 

Xuntae and Terri

We returned to the tiny site museum and read the panels, in which San, other Botswanans and outsiders all talked about the importance of Tsodilo.  There was an element of inevitable sadness in the statements by the San about how the once-abundant game had become rarer, how the springs flowed less than in the past, and how the blessings of the ancestral spirits no longer flowed to the remaining San.  Xuntae told us how, since Bantu villagers had moved into the area with their cattle, the game had declined precipitously and the supply of wild honey, the great dietary joy of the San, had almost disappeared with large-scale collection of firewood and overgrazing by cattle and goats.  He was surprisingly sanguine about it; perhaps given the wars of extermination waged by the Bantu and the Boers over the years against the San, they have concluded that resistance is futile.

We retired to the shade of Stanley and his awning after having a lovely picnic lunch under the shade trees beside the museum.  I napped and read more van der Post, did some yoga and had a great sundown toast watching the last orange embers of day play on the rocky slopes of Tsodilo, before watching a full moon rise majestic in the sky.  We made a campfire out of some of the dead wood lying around on the ground and sat there trying to commune with our inner San.

Terri trying her hand at San art

The next day we got up early and went back along the interpretive path to our favourite set of paintings in order to try our hands at sketching them.  It has to be said that the San artists were much more accomplished at rendering life-like animals than either of us were!  It gave us a good chance, though, to focus on the details and subtleties of the paintings and to try to intuit what the original artists meant by them.  Eventually we returned to Stanley for a late brunch of apple and banana fritters and watched huge clouds of quelea birds coming to drink at the little water trough (made from half a PET bottle) that Terri had put out for them.  As had been the case at Mwandi View, the sheer number of queleas was amazing, as was their ability to fly to and from the water from a nearby tree in a continuous stream without bumping into each other.  A few louries dropped in for water as well, their comical prolonged croaking echoing against the rock faces.  I sat and finished off Lost World of the Kalahari, did some yoga and sat musing on the passing of an entire way of life.  Terri went off for a run and managed to trip over a rock and land on her knee; now, two months later, the leg still troubles her.

Tsodilo rhinoceri

We set off at 3:15, headed for Drotsky’s Camp, a well-known fishing camp on the west side of the Okavango Panhandle.  We bumped back to the main track and once again found no-one around to collect camping fees at the gate.  Given the dilapidated state of the facilities and the lack of water, it didn’t bother us too much to drive away without seeking out the ticket people.  It was an easy, short drive back along the good dirt track to the main highway, and then a few kilometres north to Drotsky’s.  We set up camp in a perfectly maintained campsite, with spotless ablution blocks and spacious sites.  We could hear hippos and elephants snorting and splashing around in the marshes below us.  The contrast between the arid, derelict campground at Tsodilo and this oasis of well-watered loveliness was striking.  We dined well on lamb chops and had a huge campfire, listening to elephants passing by close behind us in the darkness.

On the water of the Okavango River near Drotsky's

Drotsky’s is a fishing camp, and I was keen to try out my birthday present from Terri, a fishing rod, but in order to fish, you have to hire a boat and captain (fairly pricey), as they don’t let people fish from the riverbank in front of the lodge.  I tried practicing my casting in the pond below our campsite, but all I managed to achieve was a series of snags on submerged vegetation that cost me several hooks.  After a lazy day of breakfast, reading (I had moved onto Cry of the Kalahari), juggling and catching up on photographs, we set off for a late-afternoon boat cruise with a French couple along the Okavango River.  It was a great chance to do some birdwatching with a really knowledgeable guide, with the highlight being a colony of hundreds of brightly coloured Southern carmine bee-eaters nesting in the vertical mudbanks of the river a few kilometres upstream.  It was thatch-collecting season and local villagers were everywhere cutting and bundling up reeds from the marshes and transporting them across the river in tiny mokoro canoes.  The light was perfect and it was a wonderful farewell (or so we thought) to the magical Okavango.

Southern carmine bee-eaters

Southern carmine bee-eaters 

We got back to Drotsky’s just before sunset and managed to have sunset gins-and-tonics on the dock as the sun sank into the papyrus marshes.  Once again we stoked up a sizeable campfire and sat around eating, sipping wine, reading and playing guitar under the brilliant stars of a southern night sky.

The next day, Tuesday, September 19^th, found us driving back to Maun, eager to get back, buy supplies and head to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.  The long drive was enlivened by strange sounds coming from the engine that turned out to be the secondary fan belt (the one that runs the air conditioning) coming off as the little tensioning wheel fell apart.  Luckily we had stopped immediately, before the wheel had a chance to fly into the main fan, and since we knew that it wasn’t essential to the functioning of the engine, we removed the belt and the wheel and continued on our way, wondering what it was about heading to Maun that was so dangerous to fan belts.  We drove into Maun, having contacted our Good Samaritan mechanic Jake, bought a new tensioning wheel, did our shopping at Beef Boys for our upcoming expedition and headed back to Laphroaig’s Chalets to meet Jake.  He replaced the fan belt and, for good measure, welded a couple of small cracks that he had spotted in the load bed of the truck.  All the while Terri was cooking up a feast of roast lamb and potatoes which we shared with Jake once the welding was done.  We went to bed late but confident that Stanley was ready for the Central Kalahari.

Jake doing some welding on Stanley

Once again, as had become habitual, it took a while to tear ourselves away from the embrace of Maun the next morning, as we had to refill water tanks and wallets and our refrigerator.  We didn’t leave town until 11:15, driving east and then southeast along the main road until the town of Rakops.  We spent a ridiculous amount of time in Rakops trying to find fuel (our GPS misled us, and the fuel station had moved) and trying to find the proper turnoff for the Central Kalahari (once again our GPS was hallucinating).  We eventually got on the right track and trundled along into the reserve, eventually leaving behind the overgrazed wasteland along the main road.  We got to the main gate at 4 pm, checked in and marvelled again at what an amazing bargain the Central Kalahari is in terms of admission and camping fees:  4 nights for two adults was about $120, much less than at most other wildlife parks in southern Africa.  We bought some firewood at the gate (collecting inside the reserve is officially prohibited) and drove to Kori campsite.  The dry thorny bush gave way at the last minute to the flat open shortgrass of Deception Valley, site of Mark and Delia Owens’ research camp in Cry of the Kalahari.  We spotted our first springboks, a few bat-eared foxes, Southern ground-squirrels, huge kori bustards, steenboks and clouds of quelea birds.  It made for a memorable entrance to the Central Kalahari.

A campfire, a necessary accompaniment to camping in Botswana

The campsites in the CKGR are very widely separated, giving you the illusion of being completely alone in the wilderness, so when we pulled into our allotted spot, Kori 3, and found a couple just setting up their tent we were all a bit nonplussed.  It turned out that the other couple had mistaken Kori 3 for Deception campsite 3, a few kilometres away, and with profuse apologies they packed up and sped off, leaving us just enough time for sundowner snacks and wine.  We walked over in the gloaming to see no fewer than 6 kori bustards stalking around the grasslands looking for prey; the world’s heaviest flying birds, they are impressive creatures, particularly when the males puff out their necks in courtship displays.  We went out again after dinner to see if we could find any nocturnal creatures with our spotlight, but we had no luck.  We lingered around the campfire as the Magellanic Clouds rotated into view, sipping tea and reading, thinking how privileged we were to be able to enjoy such solitude in this harsh yet beautiful wilderness.

I see you!  Bat-eared fox trying to hide in the short grass

We got up early the next morning, keen to get out wildlife spotting.  Tea, coffee and rusks did for breakfast and before 8 am we were driving.  We planned to do just a short local loop, but it ended up being 69 kilometres.  The Central Kalahari’s game is overwhelmingly concentrated in its pans, rounded depressions that sometimes fill with water in the rainy season and often keep some water in their lowest points throughout the long dry season.  We visited a number of the nearby pans:  Sunday, Leopard and Kori, hoping for cheetahs and wild dogs, although realizing that both were long shots. 

Gemsbok and springbok, the classic Kalahari antelope

Sunday Pan was full of springbok and gemsbok (oryx), the two species of antelope best adapted to arid conditions.  The Central Kalahari is not technically a desert since it receives a reasonable amount of rain.  The problem is that the water tends to seep away immediately into the soil, leaving almost no surface water for animals to survive the long dry season.  The species that do thrive there, like the springbok and gemsbok, can run on very little liquid water, deriving enough moisture from their food, including succulent desert melons that they dig up with their hoofs.  A black-backed jackal trotted past us as we watched the gemsbok, and a number of kori bustards patrolled the plain, along with a couple of smaller but still fearsome secretarybirds. 

A springbok playing peek-a-boo

We drove through the dusty, almost lifeless intervening high ground to Sunday waterhole, an artificial water source that attracts oodles of gemsbok and springbok, along with another jackal.  We lingered a bit, hoping for predators, but we were out of luck.  We looped around Leopard Pan, past its magnificently-located campsites (booked out months in advance by Kalahari connoisseurs), looking out at kori, gemsbok, springbok, a couple of steenbok and two wonderfully comic bat-eared foxes.  Eventually, hungry and starting to overheat in the 42 degree temperatures, we returned to Kori for a lunch of bacon and eggs.

Apparently these facial markings help shed heat?

 

Black-backed jackal

We lounged throughout the heat of the afternoon, watching birds coming in for water in our little PET bottle birdbath:  village weavers, great sparrows, glossy starlings, sparrow-weavers and red-eyed bulbuls.  Our camp resident, a slender mongoose, came by repeatedly on his rounds and I tried to get the perfect photo of him, a task made difficult by his reluctance to stand still. Eventually the furnace-like conditions began to abate and Terri and I went for a walk along the main track, watching carefully for lions and leopards, then back for sunset, scaring up a scrubhare along the way.  We had an elaborate apero at sunset, with smoked salmon and a selection of delicious cheeses on pita bread, before cooking up steaks and corn.  As we put food back into the fridge, we made the unwelcome discovery that its temperature was warm and rising:  another repair mission to be carried out in Maun!  We sat beside a roaring campfire getting in touch with our inner hunter-gatherer selves.  Lying in bed in Stanley later that night, I smelled smoke and got up to investigate, worried that something was on fire in the camper.  It was a false alarm, just smoke from the dying campfire, but my headlight picked out a black-backed jackal who had come in for a drink our birdbath, and wasn’t at all fussed by my presence. 

Terri at Kori campsite

The slender mongoose who enlivened our Kori campsite

Friday, September 23^rd saw us move on from our little oasis at Kori.  Many overlanders make a complete traverse of the CKGR from Kori to the southwest, but with us a bit unsure about how much to trust Stanley’s rebuilt 4WD, and the route description saying that there are very few animals to be seen on the traverse, just endless dry and almost lifeless thornveld, we had decided to do a loop around the northeastern corner of the park and then retreat once again to Maun.  That morning we were up with the sun, heard a distinctive lion’s roar in the distance, made a sumptuous feast of oatmeal, raisins, nuts, dates and yoghurt, and were rolling south and then west by 8:15.  

Crimson-breasted bushshrike

We drove down the Deception Valley, scene of most of Mark and Delia Owens’ adventures and misadventures, passing bat-eared foxes and the obligatory herds of gemsbok and springbok.  We continued west along the Letichau Valley, an ancient waterway that once, long ago in a wetter era, channeled water from the Okavango towards a huge lake where the Makgadikgadi Pans are now.  There was a small artificial waterhole surrounded by springbok and gemsbok, but sadly no predators.  A vehicle coming the other way told us that there was a pride of 6 lions at Piper Pan; looking at the map, we decided reluctantly that it would be too long a detour out of our way and continued north, east, north and then west again to Phokoje Pan, where black-backed jackals joined the usual springbok and gemsbok suspects on the plain.  Along the way we began to spot lots of northern black korhaan, a sort of smaller cousin of the kori bustard, with the koris apparently giving way to the black korhaans as the terrain got drier and more open.

Phokoje campsite and its lone tree

Our campsite at Phokoje proved to be a grave disappointment.  Unlike at Kori, there are almost no tall or medium-sized trees to be found in the area, just short scrubby bushes and short grass.  Our campsite consisted of a long-drop latrine and one lone, sad shade tree in whose shadow we parked Stanley.  It felt very desolate and far from any animal action, as well as being blast-furnace hot in the afternoon sun.  There were far fewer birds than we had had at Kori, although there were a few Marico flycatchers, queleas and black-throated prinias, along with one very friendly and curious Kalahari scrub robin.  We passed a lazy afternoon taking a siesta in our big bed in Stanley, then rehydrating with mint tea and beer as we munched more smoked salmon and Camembert.  Our refrigerator had completely given up on cooling, with a temperature of 21 degrees inside it, so we were keen to eat up any perishable items.  Given the unappealing location of Phokoje and the temperamental fridge, we decided to cut our losses and head out north towards the park boundary the next morning.

Kori bustard

Pale chanting goshawk, common raptor of the Kalahari

That night, after a fine meal of smoked fish and potatoes and a roaring campfire, we slept with Stanley’s roof flap open to let in cool air and to give a view of the stars.  Both Terri and I woke up from time to time to stare up at the small square section of the heavens above our heads and wondered why we hadn’t slept this way before.

We slept long and deeply and awoke before the dawn.  We were on our way by 7:45 after bolting down some coffee, hot chocolate and rusks with honey.  Our path lay to the northwest, past a series of pans (Phokoje, San and Phukwe) to our breakfast stop at Passarge Waterhole, where we paused to fry up eggs and the last of our bacon.  There were plenty of black korhaans and a handful of kori bustards pacing around the bush, and the usual contingents of gemsbok and springbok lying in the scanty shade of small trees on the edges of the pans.  As we headed north, away from the pans, we spotted the distinctive profile of a secretarybird (one of my favourite African birds) as well as the first three giraffes of the CKGR.  At Motopi waterhole we ran into a party of kudu as well as (very unexpectedly) four enormous elephants and twenty or so ostriches, along with a couple of black-backed jackal.  As we drove away from Motopi into the featureless bush, our only real regret was that we had not seen any cheetah anywhere in the park.

Bacon and eggs stop at Passarge Waterhole

We exited the park at the little-frequented Tsau Gate and turned due west along a track that ran parallel to the boundary fence of the reserve.  It was in excellent shape and I zipped along averaging 50 km/h until, suddenly, we found the only deep sand of the entire track and a big truck stuck in it, blocking the track entirely.  We tried, unwisely, to go around the obstacle and got ourselves thoroughly stuck in loose, deep sand that not even our newly fixed 4WD could get us out of.  We dug and pushed for a while, and then, just as we were almost out of the sand, another truck, coming to the rescue of his stuck comrade, came driving along quickly and out of control in reverse without any rearview mirrors.  Terri, at the wheel of Stanley while the other truck driver and his assistant and I dug and pushed, saw the collision coming and yelled out to us, but we weren’t quick enough to avoid the would-be Good Samaritan backing into the back of Stanley at speed.  Luckily he stopped as soon as he heard bending metal, and equally luckily it was the little-used gas canister holder at the back of the camper that took most of the blow (transforming it into a tangle of useless metal that we later pulled off entirely).  We yelled at the driver, who seemed to be as bad at understanding what had happened as he was at driving, and eventually he managed to figure out how to move around us.  We eventually pushed Stanley out and then followed a Land Cruiser driven by CKGR rangers on a wild bush-bashing detour through the thornveld to get around the stuck truck and back out onto the track. 

Perfect wild campsite just outside the CKGR

It had eaten up a lot of time getting around the truck, so we looked for a place to camp wild beside the track and found one just a kilometre further along.  Another short bush-bash over a few small trees and we were in a decent-sized clearing that featured a series of large excavated holes that looked suspiciously like a hyena warren.  Hoping that the hyenas weren’t currently in residence, we popped the top on Stanley, had a brief late afternoon snack of matzo crackers (our latest staple starch source), Camembert and red wine.  Just before sundown we dragged our chairs and our wine glasses back out to the road where we watched a beautiful sunset, tinged red by Kalahari dust in the air, sitting right in the middle of the empty dirt road.  It seemed like a fitting farewell to our four days in the Central Kalahari.  That night we sat around a crackling fire reflecting that all of our camping over the previous five months had been leading up to the succession of perfect wilderness campsites we had had in the Kalahari.

Sundowners in the middle of the road

We drove into Maun the next morning along a perfect sand track right to the main highway, then along the highway. No more than two kilometres along the track, an unfamiliar animal loped across the track; its silhouette looked like that of a spotted hyena, but the colouring was far too dark and lacked stripes.  Leafing through our mammal book, we concluded that it was a brown hyena, the secretive lone scavengers that Delia Owens had studied for her PhD forty years earlier.  It was a great feeling to spot a new predator, especially one as cryptic in its habits as the brown hyena.  I rather think that we had camped atop one of its abandoned dens the night before. 

The one car that came to disturb our sundowners

We stopped briefly at Lake Ngami to try to do some birdwatching, as we had heard that this lake, full of water after years of being dry, was full of waterbirds.  It was difficult finding a track to the lakeshore, but when we got there it was an apocalyptic wasteland of land grazed right to the soil by cattle dotted with dead trees leading right into the muddy water.  It was no place to linger, so we turned around and headed straight back to the main road and into Maun.

Okavango from above

When we were last in Maun, we had run into a couple of tourists who had raved about scenic flights over the Okavango.  Terri was keen to do one, so we drove straight to the airport and made a reservation for that same afternoon.  After a couple of hours of delicious Indian food and wifi at an airport restaurant, we wandered out onto the runway at 4 pm.  Maun airport is peculiar in that almost no large planes land there, and yet dozens of tiny aircraft take off and land constantly, ferrying people and supplies out to the exclusive top-end fly-in safari camps of the western Okavango Delta.  

Elephants seen from above, Okavango

We clambered into a tiny 4-seater plane and were soon roaring at 150 metres’ elevation over the southern edge of the Delta.  At first we passed over cattle country, but soon enough we were flying over wilderness.  The Delta, at whose edges we had nibbled in Moremi and Khwai and at Drotsky’s, was revealed as a complex immense jigsaw of streams, marshes and small islands of dry land.  As we made a big turn and headed south again, the density of game animals increased dramatically.  Big herds of red lechwe grazed in the marshes, while families of 20 or 30 elephants moved placidly across the landscape.  Zebras and impalas teemed here and there, while occasionally huge herds of wildebeest and buffalo streamed determinedly in a huge migratory line.  Giraffe and hippos appeared here and there, but we were past them too quickly for me to take many decent photos. 

Buffalo on the move, Okavango

As impressive as the picture of the sheer density of animals was, I think that the landscape itself was even more striking.  I have always been a huge fan of Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the French photographer whose Earth From Above exhibition featured dozens of incredible aerial photos taken from ultralights around the world, and the Okavango From Above provided equally memorable views of lakes, ponds, rivers and meadows.  It was almost sensory overload, and I was actually glad when the 50 minute flight was over as I was sated with visual imagery, not to mention almost airsick.  Terri and I both agreed that it was 100 dollars each well spent as we drove back to Audi Camp, ready for our last stay in Maun.

Okavango scenery

We spent two contrasting days in Maun, one spent running annoying errands that expanded to eat up our entire day:  getting our reverse lights seen to yet again (Mike’s mechanics hadn’t reconnected them after working on the transfer case), getting our refrigerator fixed (one of the pipes had cracked and refrigerant had leaked out), buying groceries and electrical supplies and scissors and other items too diverse to remember.  While we were standing in line to pay for the scissors in a pharmacy, a deafening bang shook the walls, followed by a pall of acrid smoke that drove us out onto the pavement wondering if a bomb had gone off.  As it turned out, a storage battery (used for storing electric power during the frequent blackouts) had built up too much hydrogen gas on its terminals after being overcharged by an inverter and had exploded.  It was a bit alarming, given how Stanley’s batteries are charged by our solar panels and an explosion like that would be very dangerous inside such a confined space.  Luckily a little internet research revealed that our solar panels didn’t develop enough voltage to build up substantial amounts of hydrogen, so we slept soundly that night.

This is never good news for your refrigerator!

The next day was a blissfully unbusy day, spent loafing around Audi Camp, ready for our departure the next day for the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.  We made use of the time to buy tickets for an upcoming leg of our travels, to Madagascar in early November, and took advantage of the swimming pool.

Wednesday, September 28^th found us leaving Maun for the fourth and final time in a three week period.  As usual, it took a while to break free of the gravitational field of the city, with stops at Spar and Beef Boys for groceries, and the Department of Wildlife and National Parks to pay for our campsite reservations.  At about US$ 22 for two people for two nights, including park entrance fees, it was the deal of the trip.  We had two slight scares on the way out of town:  our newly-repaired refrigerator suddenly started to show higher temperatures after we added food to it (luckily, by the time we drove back to the fridge people, the temperature had started to go down again—maybe it took a while for the new refrigerant gas to really get working?) and we seemed to have a soft tire.  We put some air into the tire and drove out of town by 11:30 on the long road south.

We had been advised to hide our meat somewhere not inside the fridge until we had passed the veterinary control fence (one of a network of such fences with road checkpoints trying, vainly, to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease from the Okavango Delta into the south of the country).  We did so, and once we were past the checkpoint, we dug out the steaks and pork chops and put them back into the fridge.  Little did we know that there were two veterinary checkpoints, so we were duly busted at the next one.  The inspectors looked into the fridge and found the meat.  Luckily, we had the option to cook up the meat on the spot on our stove; the restrictions only apply to raw meat, so we fried up the steaks and chops by the side of the road and then set off again on our way, bemused by the system.

Yellow mongoose, Mabuasehube campsite

It was a long, flat drive on excellent roads, and we spent the time listening to podcasts, chatting and watching for ostriches and steenboks, both of which made appearances beside the road.  A lot of the way the scenery was very much like the CKGR, but towards the end fences and cattle and massive overgrazing resumed, making for a less appealing landscape.  We stopped for the night in a little well-run campsite in Kang, behind the Ultra Stop gas station, ate our pre-cooked pork chops and sat out under the stars for less time than usual, as the slightly more southerly location made a big difference in nighttime temperatures.  The temperature had dropped to 10 degrees by the time we got up the next morning.

Thursday, November 29^th began with a trip to a tire repair outfit, as we woke up to find that the pressure in the suspect tire had dropped in half overnight.  It was done quickly, efficiently and very cheaply (US$ 4!) by two guys in a tiny, junk-strewn yard who had a steady stream of customers; the combination of lots of thorns and people driving on heavily worn tires makes for a lot of punctures.  By 10 am we were on our way, and by 11:25 we were in Hukuti.  We fuelled up, bought some lunch at the local supermarket, then drove another 10 kilometres to the end of the tarmac at Lokgwabe, where Terri (as usual) took over the wheel for the dirt road section.  It was a good track at first, but then we hit a section that was being repaired, with big truckloads of coarse gravel that were being graded into the fine red dust.  That made for slow, tricky driving, but then the gravel stopped and we were in deep, deep dusty sand.  We let down the tires to 1.1 bars and plowed on.  It was tough going at first, but eventually the road improved somewhat and Terri was able to hit 50 km/h in places.  It wasn’t ideal driving conditions, but it was at least much easier than our experiences in Liuwa Plain and on the M14 in northern Zambia. 

As we headed towards the park, we were still passing small cattle stations, but we started to see a few gemsbok and steenbok here and there, along with a lone ostrich.  We stopped to collect a pile of firewood and made it to Mabuasehube Gate by 3:30.  We were a day early for our reservation, as we had anticipated camping in the bush outside the camp gate, but it turned out that there was a campsite available that night, so we paid for an extra night and moved in.  We were in the least desireable campsite in the park, right inside the gate, since the combination of proximity to South Africa, cheap camping and great wildlife makes for a lot of South African wildlife enthusiasts booking up campsites months in advance.  It was still a lovely spot, shaded by trees and frequented by birds, and our campfire made for a perfect atmosphere.

Brown hyena, Kgalakgadi

The next morning we were up earlyish, but lingered over breakfast and moved a few possessions to the campsite next door, where we were to spend the next two nights.  By 8:40 we were off on a circuit around the nearby pans.  The scenery was redder and dryer than it had been in the Central Kalahari, but the pans were still a centre of life.  Our first pan, Monamodi, gave us a prolonged close encounter with a brown hyena, giving us a much better view than our fleeting glimpse on the way out of the CKGR.  It’s a down-at-heel sort of creature, with a big, straggling mane and a hyena’s characteristic pained loping gait.  After he lumbered into the bush, we saw a few kudu and a pair of secretarybirds before driving on towards Lesholoago Pan.  We had heard that this pan had a lioness with 4 young cubs, but we were unable to locate them.  We chatted with an elderly Belgian couple camped there (they come every year to the Kgalagadi as part of two or three months in southern Africa; they had made their reservations a year beforehand) and admired the colourful violet-cheeked waxbills that clustered around their tiny birdbath. 

Quelea by the thousands stream out of a tree

We drove partway around the pan and had a brunch feast of leftover steak with peanut butter and alfalfa sprouts on pita bread—it was much more delicious than it might sound!  As we ate, we watched a tree absolutely loaded with thousands of quelea just above the artificial waterhole; it seemed impossible that that many birds could fit in one tree.  A greater kestrel made an unsuccessful raid into the branches in search of lunch, while two lanner falcons circled menacingly overhead.  A sizeable party of wildebeest mingled with springbok out in the middle of the pan.  Mabuasehube Pan gave us wonderful views out over the countryside, but very little game.  Mpayathutlwa Pan, our last stop, had black-backed jackals, tons of vultures of several species lurking around the waterhole, and another secretarybird.  Sadly we couldn’t find any meerkats or big predators, although we had heard that both were there somewhere.  We retreated to our campsite in the heat of the early afternoon for a relaxed afternoon of yoga, juggling and guitar before another delicious sunset wine-and-cheese selection followed by another dinner under the stars, beside a crackling fire.

Kestrel on his approach to the quelea's tree

Our sleep that night was disturbed as a brown hyena, perhaps the same one we had seen earlier, came by in the night to ransack the garbage can, full of remains from the previous occupants.  It took hours for the hyena to make his way noisily through the contents, with much banging of cans and clanking of bottles.  No sooner had we drifted back to sleep than two striped hyenas arrived to drive away the brown hyena and take over pillaging duties.  Ordinarily the garbage cans would have been emptied, but it was the 50^th anniversary of Botswana’s independence from Britain, a huge national holiday and party, and the park staff had been too busy celebrating to do garbage collection duty.

View out over Mabuasehube Pan

A bit groggily, we woke up to cloud cover, something we hadn’t seen much of for a while.  A hearty breakfast of oatmeal with dates, raisins and chopped nuts revived us and we set off again for a tour of the nearby pans, hoping for lions, cheetahs and meerkats.  We didn’t find any of those, and even the ordinary wildlife of the previous day was scarcer than usual.  We found the same vultures as the previous day, a couple of jackals, some kudu, gemsbok and springbok, but the main interest for us was the contrast in landscape, from deep red sand to stony rockscapes.  Most visitors to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park try to do the traverse from the eastern Botswanan campsites (where we were) to the South African border.  We were keen to try this, but of course all the necessary campsites were completely booked out, so we had to content ourselves with the Mabuasehube end.  We returned to camp, had a long nap to make up for the hyena-induced insomnia, then got up in time for juggling, yoga and sundowners.  The sunset was even better than usual, as the high cirrus clouds set the entire sky on fire.  We had pea-and-lentil soup for supper, along with corn on the cob, and it was a perfect end to the day, sitting around a raging fire (we hoped it would keep hyenas away!) and reflecting on the amazing month we had spent in Botswana.

Red-billed spurfowl at our campsite in the Kgalakgadi

The wildlife experiences weren’t over just yet.  That night, before we went to bed, the pair of spotted hyenas made a brief return appearance, sending a nervous Terri into Stanley’s safety quite quickly, while the brown hyena showed up at 10:30 to drink water from our little birdbath, and then again at 2 am to filch an empty tin of sardines from our sundowner snack.  As we had breakfast, one of the two yellow-billed hornbills that haunted our campsite sneaked up on Terri’s camp chair and stole her breakfast rusk, to her great annoyance.  The hornbills, along with a very curious yellow mongoose, had been our favourite small wildlife in the Kgalagadi, along with a group of noisy and inquisitive red-billed spurfowl that dropped by the campsite from time to time.  We ate the rest of the rusks and then packed up for our next expedition, to a nearby place, Jack’s Pan, which had been described to us as a free, wild spot to camp and to see lots of lions.  

Our noisy, naughty yellow-billed hornbills

We retraced our tracks from a few days earlier north along the eastern boundary of the park, and the track was almost unrecognizable, as it had been graded the day before and was in mint condition.  As we drove, we were putting down the first tire tracks of the day while following a definite track of a big cat.  Eventually, with Terri at the wheel, I spotted the source of the tracks, a big leopard lying beside the road.  We screeched to a halt and leapt out to take photos.  The leopard seemed pretty unconcerned by our presence, but was sitting in a shady spot that made for poor photos.  I tried (perhaps unwisely) to get a big closer on foot, at which point the leopard got up and trotted away into denser bush.  We were excited to see him, as it was only the second leopard we had ever spotted on our own (in the Khwai and Kruger, we had mostly had them pointed out to us by others). 

The leopard who crossed our path twice on the way out of the Kgalakgadi

Jack’s Pan was a bit of a washout.  We had an old guidebook that suggested a route to the pan which had obviously not been used for a long time.  The track got narrower and narrower, and the sound of thorns scratching along the side of Stanley was constant and nerve-wracking.  Eventually we gave up on the idea and decided to make a run for the South African border instead.  We zigzagged back through the bush and headed back along the boundary road.  Less than two hundred metres from where our previous tracks showed that we had stopped to look at the leopard, we spotted him again.  This time we got even better views and were able to photograph him at leisure.  Buzzing from the excitement, we passed the Mabuasehube gate and headed south into new territory.  Another ten kilometres down the track and we saw yet another leopard, this one an even larger male, crossing the track in front of us.  We stopped to watch him until he slunk off into the undergrowth.  It was amazing; two full days of searching for big cats inside the park had been fruitless, while within two hours we had had three leopard encounters outside the park boundary.

Yet another great campfire, this time with a roasting pan full of potatoes

The track to the southeast from the corner of the park back towards tarmac was surprisingly good, and we averaged 60 km/h along it until we came to pavement near Tshabong.  We stopped to refuel and refill our tires (we had another slow leak from the thorns) and stopped at a supermarket for some food.  The town seemed very rough around the edges, a harsh contrast to the wonderful nature reserve we had been in for three nights.  We sped along a newly surfaced asphalt road paralleling the South African border, past cattle farms and overgrazed red sand dunes, until we found a hidden side road perfect for camping.  Our last night in Botswana was spent in an idyllic, quiet spot under the stars.  It had been an amazing month, easily the highlight of our time in southern Africa, and the next morning it was going to end.  It was a contemplative night under the canopy of southern constellations.

You lookin' at me?

The next morning, Monday, October 3^rd, it took only an hour to get to the tiny South African border post at Bokspits.  The Botswanan border folks were quick and efficient and professional, while one of the South Africans kept trying to get our address and e-mail to discuss “business investments” in tourism.  We were sad to leave Botswana behind, but I am sure that one day we will be back to the jewel of southern African travel.

A perfect final campsite in Botswana

Looking back on Botswana now, both Terri and I agree that it was our favourite country in southern Africa (although we haven’t yet been to Namibia, about which most people rave).  The wildlife viewing is amazing:  Chobe is one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on earth, the Okavango Delta and Khwai are equally impressive, while the arid country of the CKGR and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park provide views of a different suite of animal species.  The Tsodilo Hills are worth visiting for the rock art, while the Makgadikgadi Pans, which we barely touched, would be worth returning and investigating further.  Elephant Sands was a wonderful surprise, and Botswana is easily the best country on our trip for finding free wild campsites.  The emptiness and wilderness of much of the country is incredibly appealing.  It’s also nice to see a sub-Saharan African country that has done such a good job of converting mineral wealth (Botswana is the world’s largest producer of diamonds, and has a number of mines producing other minerals such as gold) into a broadly prosperous middle-class country.  The contrast with places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Nigeria and many other resource-rich African countries is striking.  I think that if you have your own car (or have rented a 4x4 equipped for camping, as so many people do) in southern Africa, Botswana should be your first port of call.

Yellow mongooses are irresistably cute!

Zimbabwe: Wonderful Adventures in a Failing State

Cape Maclear, Malawi, July 18

Once again I find myself a bit behind on my blog posting, but maybe a delay of a couple of weeks helps give me added perspective on a place.  Or maybe I’m just a bit disorganized.  Whatever the case, it’s been two weeks since we left Zimbabwe, and it’s high time that I tried to set down on paper (or the screen?) some of my impressions of that beautiful, slightly tragic country.

Terri and Thabbeth, twin towers of humanitarian work

Our introduction to Zimbabwe on Tuesday, June 14^th was not the most positive.  The Beitbridge border crossing from South Africa, the only crossing point between the two countries, is a zoo, with thousands of Zimbabweans (and a tiny handful of South Africans and other nationals) thronging the immigrations and customs queues.  It took over an hour of lining up to get our exit stamps from South Africa, with the lines twice being shut down arbitrarily and everyone rushing en masse to a new place to line up again.  Almost everyone in our line was Zimbabwean, many of them either cross-border traders or people working in South Africa, and they knew the ropes intimately:  where the next queue would open up (across the parking lot in a small container converted to an immigration shed), how to slide past others discreetly to get closer to the front of the queue, how the queue would suddenly divide into three indistinguishable files and which one to join.  The South African immigration officials were off-handedly rude to the Zimbabweans, shouting at them and ignoring them in equal measure.  When we finally got through to the Zimbabwean side, we had would-be fixers pestering us, and a tiny queue of perhaps nine people waiting for their TIP (Temporary Import Permit) to bring a vehicle into Zimbabwe took almost an hour and a half.  It was an expensive border to cross, with my visa as a Canadian costing US$ 75, and the car costing $64 for road tolls, third-party insurance and the cost of the permit itself.  It was almost two o’clock by the time we got rolling up the road to Bulawayo, three hours after we had first parked on the South African side, and we were keen to get to Bulawayo before dark.

Thabbeth and her Sethule Trust team

The road ran through a desolate hot, dusty Lowveld that looked almost uninhabited and uninhabitable.  As we drove along on smooth tarmac, we slowly and imperceptibly started to climb.  We ran into our first few Zimbabwean traffic police checkpoints and made it through without paying any fines, despite the fearsome reputation that these cops have for finding faults and issuing fines.  The cops were polite, welcoming and completely professional, and having shown our fire extinguishers, breakdown warning triangles, high-visibility vests and the TIP a few times, we were always waved through.  As we approached Bulawayo, at around 1400 metres above sea level, the countryside began to look a bit more prosperous and lived-in.  The sun set not long before we got to the southern edge of Zimbabwe’s second city, and we crawled in in the dark, Terri navigating us in expertly to our destination despite the best efforts of our car GPS to claim ignorance of Bulawayo street names.

A Civilized Interlude in Bulawayo

A preschool helped by my former school LAS

Our destination was the home of a former colleague of mine from Leysin American School.  Thabbeth is a black Zimbabwean nurse who married an English doctor, Michael.  They lived and worked for nearly twenty years in Bulawayo before the deteriorating economic and political situation drove them to emigrate to Switzerland a decade ago.  Terri also knew Thabbeth from Leysin, as they both run charitable projects in Africa and had compared notes a few times.  Thabbeth’s outfit, Sethule Trust, works with orphans and vulnerable children in and around Bulawayo, trying to improve their educational prospects.  Terri had long been curious to see Thabbeth’s projects in action, and since we knew that Thabbeth was going to be in Zimbabwe during the LAS school holidays, we had planned for several months to coincide with her in Bulawayo.  When we finally found her house in the southern suburbs, it proved to be a palatial building in a huge tract of land, surrounded by several outbuildings and cottages, one of which was reserved for us.  We had a joyful reunion with Thabbeth, ate and then collapsed into bed, tired from a long day of driving. 

We spent the next three days in and around Bulawayo.

Recess time!

On Wednesday, we accompanied Thabbeth and various staff members of Sethule on visits to a couple of rural elementary schools at which they were considering starting projects to help develop computer skills.  The first school was in pretty bad shape, with its classroom buildings starting to crumble as termites ate their way through the wood of the roof structure, but its headmistress seemed to be a well-organized woman who runs a tight ship.  The classrooms we visited seemed to be teaching quite advanced topics, and the students seemed fairly motivated to learn.  There were quite a lot of students who looked absolutely destitute, and I asked the headmistress what they and their parents were doing out in the middle of semi-arid nowhere; what economic basis was there for living out there?  The answer was that until 2002, a huge commercial farm had been in operation here, run by a white Zimbabwean farmer who had employed hundreds of local black farmhands.

Me helping instill good handwashing hygiene among the kids

Then the farm was nationalized and taken over by the government, and the new owners, politically connected ZANU-PF supporters, had not tried to run the farm commercially, resulting in all the workers losing their jobs and being thrown into complete poverty.  This was something to contemplate as we went to another school, this one near a still-functioning commercial farm.  The students seemed far better dressed here, while the school buildings were much newer and better maintained, apparently thanks to donations from local big farmers.  A couple of my former LAS colleagues who had accompanied an LAS student trip to Zimbabwe a couple of years earlier were sponsoring three children at this school and we said hello to them, while looking at some of the (quite good) poetry that they had produced. 

Me at one of Sethule's preschools

We had a tour around downtown Bulawayo in the afternoon, visiting the city art gallery where a series of young resident artists were producing both typical folk-influenced art and more contemporary works.  We had lunch at a trendy café, and then looked at some more art before going to a concert.  It was the opening concert of the Bulawayo International Music Festival, and featured a mix of high school orchestras and choirs, a gospel group and two energetic African dance troupes.  The music was good, but what was more striking was just the normality of it all—young musicians, both black and white, playing music and singing as would happen anywhere in the world, far removed from the poisonous politics of President Mugabe and the imminent economic meltdown.  It seemed a hopeful, positive sign.

Callisto, Beke, the pastor and I posing beside Stanley in the Matopos

The next day we accompanied Thabbeth out to another pre-school, the Hope Sethule pre-school, located right on the edge of the Bulawayo suburbs.  LAS students had been there a few months before on a service trip, working on playground equipment and painting.  It was good to see the results of this fund-raising and effort.  Thabbeth’s Sethule trip for LAS students and Terri’s Zambian trip for Kumon students are so similar in so many ways that it was a bit eerie.  Thabbeth had a couple of young Zimbabwean university graduates working for her, teaching at the pre-school; they were looking for higher-paying jobs more related to their studies, but with the dire economic situation in the country, they were glad to pick up any job at all.  The pre-school kids were having fun playing outdoors, eating their nshima (corn meal mush; these tiny children could pack away huge amounts of the stuff!) and singing songs in English.  I found the names of the students great:  Proffesor (spelled that way), Dogood and Precious were not atypical.  One little boy, the most recent addition to the class, took a shine to me and sat on my knee during the singing before telling me a long story in Ndbele that apparently involved him being attacked by a huge cow.  It was the first time he had really interacted with anyone since arriving in the class, and it was strangely touching, especially given the terrified reaction that most children have to meeting me!

Terri at the wheel of Stanley in the Matopo Hills

That afternoon Terri and I unfolded our Giant Expressway bikes and rode the 10 km into downtown Bulawayo.  It was an easy ride, and the downtown core was actually pleasant to cycle in, free of the insane traffic, noise and menace of many African cities.  We bought Zimbabwean SIM cards and got a new, longer seat post for my bike from Mike’s Bikes, run by a Zimbabwean lookalike and sound-alike of Farzan, the legendary bike mechanic of Petrie’s Cycles in Thunder Bay, an imposing figure in my youthful cycling experiences.

Wonderful giraffe painting at Nswatugi Cave

Matopo Hills Loveliness

On Friday the 17^th we went into town to buy a few supplies, and then in the afternoon we drove out of Bulawayo towards the Matopo Hills, the pretty area southwest of town that is a popular weekend retreat for Bulawayans as well as being a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its prehistoric San rock paintings.  Thabbeth’s family comes from this area, and she and her husband had built a weekend home there years ago.  We stayed there for the next couple of nights, enjoying the isolated country atmosphere, going running through the impressive landscape of granite outcrops and dry bush and visiting another Sethule Trust project, a pre-school based at the local Presbyterian church which Thabbeth’s family had been instrumental in building.  We also visited the nearby garden in which fresh vegetables were grown to feed to the students in the various Sethule schools in the area.

A year's worth of maize for Beke's family

We visited the family home of Beke, one of Thabbeth’s employees, a gifted mechanic who had fixed all the small, niggling things that had been going wrong with Stanley while we were staying in Bulawayo.  The most important thing that he fixed was the solar panels, which had stopped charging a couple of weeks earlier.  He located the problem (a loose connection on the roof) and fixed it.  He also found some blown fuses in our wiring and got our gas stove working again.  His family house was really a family compound, a neat enclosure full of several round houses (rondavels).  His wife had produced a bumper crop of corn despite the drought that is plaguing Southern Africa, and he had used his income from working for Thabbeth to buy a good solar charging system for the house that allowed them to be completely off the electrical grid.

Terri and I with Beke and his family in the Matopos

The Matopos are full of similar compounds, swept spotlessly clean and built solidly,  evidence of a rural prosperity and pride in the Ndebele heritage that seems to typify the Bulawayo area.

San painting of a kudu at Nswatugi cave

It was a magical couple of days, especially on Sunday morning as we drove to the isolated Nswatugi Cave to see the San paintings there.  We drove through a gnarled and timeless-feeling landscape along a track that steadily deteriorated until we abandoned Stanley at the foot of a steep rocky slope and walked the final few hundred metres.

My not-nearly-so-wonderful sketches of the Nswatugi art

The cave was impressively situated in a big rock outcrop patrolled by fat rock hyraxes who fled on our approach.  There was nobody at the cave, not even a caretaker, and we had the site to ourselves for an hour as we photographed and sketched the paintings, created in red ochre sometime between 20,000 and 2000 years ago, presumably by San hunter gatherers.  The animals were wonderfully lifelike and alive, painted with exquisite accuracy, particularly the kudu and the giraffes.  This was in such stark contrast to the strangely elongated stick figures used to depict humans that scholars have long debated what the meaning is.  One of the most popular hypotheses is that the human figures represent a state of dance-induced trance.  We loved the hour spent in the cave:  the views out over the Matopos, the isolation, the beautiful bush.  Only as we were leaving did another pair of tourists appear, a pair of young Canadian women who had hiked for two hours from park headquarters to arrive there.

A year's worth of maize for Beke's family

Prehistoric Rocks:  Khami and Great Zimbabwe

We drove out of the Matopos, into the leafy southern suburbs of Bulawayo and right out again, headed for another World Heritage site, the ruins of Khami.  We arrived on the second try, having been led into the middle of nowhere by our temperamental GPS system on the first attempt.  Khami is a wonderful site, evocative of bygone glory and almost completely deserted.  We paid our entrance fee and wandered around for a couple of hours, past tall stone-enclosed platforms that top some of the hills.  The masonry of the walls is wonderful, very accurate and decorative.  Khami was the capital of one of the successor kingdoms to Great Zimbabwe, and it reached its zenith in the 1500s and 1600s.  One of the stone platforms features a stone cross on its upper surface, presumably a reminder of a long-vanished Portuguese influence on the area.  I liked the historic atmosphere so much that I was ecstatic to find that we could camp at the site.  We set up Stanley in a picnic area under a canopy of tall trees and watched the sunset from atop one of the stone platforms, drinking wine while I played guitar.  Then, as we cooked up steaks on a charcoal grill, the full moon rose over the ruins, making for a truly unforgettable evening.  That day, with its varied and various historical and artistic overtones, was one of my favourites of the trip.  Africa is not often visited for its historic ruins, but Zimbabwe has a lot of impressive history to see.  I wrote a couple of haiku about the day:

Intricate stonework at Khami

                                Prehistoric art

                                Giraffes and kudu canter

                                In ochre outlines

                                Stones glow russet tones

                                History’s glowing embers

                                Khami afternoon

In both Nswatugi and Khami, I was amazed at the utter lack of tourists at two of the top sights for tourists to see in the entire country.  Foreign tourism into Zimbabwe is almost entirely extinct, which is a pity given how much the country has to offer visitors.

Another idyllic campsite at Khami

We slept well under the trees, and the next morning we woke up to a rich chorus of birdsong.  We spotted bearded woodpeckers, a gabar goshawk and lots of noisy Egyptian geese.  After a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, we packed up and were driving east by 9:15.  After a stopoff in Bulawayo to buy groceries and return some books to Thabbeth’s house, we set off towards our next stop, Great Zimbabwe.  It was a long drive east, and we arrived just as dusk was falling.  There was little traffic on the road, and the towns we passed through seemed somehow scruffier and less prosperous than Bulawayo.

Sunset tunes at Khami

Cross platform at Khami:  Portuguese work?

We set ourselves up in the site campsite, plugged in our fan heater and our electric oven and kept ourselves warm on the inside with some delicious lasagne that Terri whipped up in the oven, and warm on the outside with the fan heater going all night to counteract the distinct chill in the air.

Great Zimbabwe

We spent the next day at Great Zimbabwe, starting off the day with some freshly baked scones that Terri whipped up using our (almost) new oven.  Great Zimbabwe was the capital of a powerful Shona kingdom from the 11^th to the 15^th century, between the time of the Mapungubwe kingdom and the Khami kingdom.  The ruins are similar to those of Khami in terms of their stonework, but they are much, much larger in scale.  We walked up to the Hill Enclosure, 80 metres above the campground, and spent a happy hour exploring the intricate passageways and staircases linking together the various enclosures.

Terri and the Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe

After a brief visit to the museum, we walked around the Great Enclosure, a truly impressive feat of stonemasonry consisting of a towering outer wall and dozens of smaller family enclosures inside it.  The colours of the stone, the overarching trees and the surrounding stony landscape were wonderful, completely redolent of long-lost history.  It was easy to spend the day there, and it made a pleasant setting for a long afternoon jog.  Once again, the utter lack of foreign tourists was striking; we saw only one other group, a family of 4.  That evening it was much warmer than the day before and we sat out eating leftover lasagne under the just-past-full moon before retiring into our cozy sleeping quarters and comfortable bed where I composed a haiku on that day’s exploration:

History’s shadows

On Great Zimbabwe’s stonework:

So fades all glory.

Stanley on the road to Chimanimani

Chimanimani:  Montane Beauty

The meaning of the warmer air of the previous evening became clear in the morning when we woke up to rain!  Sort of ironic, given that Zimbabwe is in the grip of an El Nino-powered drought.  Terri went back to bed briefly to wait out the rain.  We left around 9 and drove into nearby Masvingo to do some grocery shopping.  Masvingo seemed poorer and grittier than Bulawayo, and the Pick’n’Pay parking lot boasted several beggars who accosted us in turn.  We eventually drove off and dropped, slowly and imperceptibly, to a mere 480 metres above sea level where we crossed the Save River on a giant suspension bridge.  From there we climbed steadily up, up and up through pine plantations that reminded me of the Sabie area, before dropping down again to the town of Chimanimani, built around a big sawmill.

Sums it up; I love the ad below

I spent much of the drive reading stories from the Zimbabwe Daily News aloud to Terri about the apocalyptic bad news enveloping every aspect of life in Zimbabwe.

We stopped in Chimanimani town to buy our park permits (we had been told erroneously that this had to be done at the park headquarters in town; in fact you can pay just as easily at the small ranger station at the foot of the mountain) before setting off on the final 15 km to the mountain’s base camp.  It was a spectacular drive along a slightly hair-raising track, and we pulled into the campsite not long before dark.  It was the night before Terri’s birthday and (since we were supposed to be hiking the next day), I prepared a special birthday celebration that night with bubbly wine, smoked salmon pate and even a (slightly burnt) chocolate cake cooked over the gas stove with the aid of an “outback oven”.  It all went well, with a beautiful sunset thrown in, until the heavens opened and it started raining on me as I barbecued some steaks.  We didn’t let the rain dampen our enthusiasm, though, and it was a pleasant evening in the campsite.

Terri's birthday celebration in Chimanimani National Park

Thursday was a bit of a washout, as it rained repeatedly, putting paid to our plans to go hiking.  We sat around reading, playing guitar and drinking tea, hoping for a window of clear weather, but it never showed up.  We went out for a brief walk in the afternoon but managed to get rained on and lost, so we turned back to eat pasta carbonara instead.

Zimbabwe's flag flies at Chimanimani Base Camp

The next day, Friday June 24^th, dawned dry and clear, so we got up, packed up and set off uphill into the Chimanimani National Park, a place that had been on my travelling radar since my sisters both hiked here two decades ago.  We planned to stay overnight in one of the many caves that dot the landscape, so we didn’t even bring a tent, although we did bring lots of food, sleeping bags and mattresses.  It was a steep and sweaty direct ascent up Bailey’s Folly trail, starting at 1200 metres’ elevation in camp and ending atop a small plateau at about 1800 metres.  We wandered along the plateau, past beautiful eroded white boulders made of some sort of quartzite, to the hut that is perched above the interior basin at the foot of the highest peaks.  We stopped there to eat some peanuts and cookies before descending to the basin in search of our cave, the Red Wall cave.

Funky rocks, Chimanimani

We wandered along, following a rough sketch map and some verbal directions, and never found the cave despite a good hour of searching.  We did see the squalid tin hut inhabited by relays of armed park rangers protecting the park from the depredations of hordes of illegal gold miners from the Mozambican side of the border (the park straddles the international boundary), and lots of pretty grassland and rocks, but there was no sign of a cave we could sleep in, so we retreated back to the hut.  We rolled out our sleeping mats in one of the four rooms of the hut and settled down to reheat some leftover lentil stew that filled our hungry bellies nicely.  As we sat watching the late afternoon light turn the peaks redder and redder, two more hikers appeared.  Daniel and Callie, a pair of American rock climbers, had been hanging out in the hut for a week, going out every day to go bouldering.  We had a long and interesting conversation with them about their travels; Callie in particular had some good stories from working in Antarctica, climbing in Alaska and cycling in Central Asia. 

Afternoon light in Chimanimani National Park

Wonderful Chimanimani flower:  possibly a Leucospermum species?

Terri hiking in Chimanimani

The next morning we said our goodbyes to Callie and Daniel and headed back down the mountain, this time on a longer route along the main river that drains the park.  We stopped for a swim at lovely Digby Falls, an oasis of great beauty amidst the wild rocky slopes.  We continued downstream for a couple of hours, hoping that our pseudo-map would be more useful than it had been the day before.  The scenery was fabulous:  alternating river rapids and placid pools, with towering rock faces above and scattered forest and wildflowers.  Eventually we turned away from the river and up a small tributary valley, full of flowers and birds and fed by some waterfalls high up above us.  Our final trudge out to the base camp along the Banana Grove trail was a comedy of navigational errors compounded by a lack of trail maintenance and signs; we walked through grass thickets taller than us, hoping that we were following the correct barely perceptible indentation in the vegetation.  Terri was quite annoyed by the time we got down at the lack of useful trail markers.  A good shower and a tasty steak dinner soothed her choler, however, and we had a pleasant evening in base camp.

Terri descending out of the Chimanimani range

As we packed up to leave the next day, Daniel and Callie appeared; Daniel’s vehicle was parked there and they were going to drive into town to buy more groceries to take up the mountain again.  We had a good chat with them before we drove off, heading north towards Nyangani national park.  The scenery was wonderful, an autumnal sea of gold and copper reminiscent of fall colours in Switzerland.

Mutarazi Falls

Adventures in Nyangani

We passed through Mutare, Zimbabwe’s third city, where we bought groceries and left Stanley parked on some dodgy streets watched over by three even dodgier-looking youth.  We bought a new speaker cable to link my iPod to Stanley’s speakers, and set off north listening to podcasts.  Following our GPS and directions from a local shop, we turned off the main road in search of Muturazi Falls, the highest waterfalls in the country.  It was an execrable 4WD track that slowly deteriorated until it became essentially undriveable.  We turned around and headed back towards the main road, giving up on the falls, until we passed a sign and a turnoff for the falls.  We decided to give it another try and ended up at the parking lot for the falls just at sunset.  We didn’t want to pay the steep US$10 admission for just a few minutes of visibility, so we turned around towards Far and Wide, a lodge we had passed a few kilometres earlier.  They were closed, but we got some drinking water from them and found a place to camp for free beside the Honde Valley Viewpoint.  It proved to be a perfect spot to camp, right on the edge of a huge escarpment, and we slept well after a splendid meal of Asian-style pork, veggies and rice.

A view into the Honde Valley from Mutarazi Falls

We woke up the next morning to tremendous views over the escarpment down into the lowlands of the Honde Valley.  We walked to Muturazi Falls, a couple of kilometres further along the escarpment, and had great views; sadly the falls face directly south, so they are never in direct sunlight, at least not in the winter months.  Despite their height and isolation, the two falls (there are actually two of them, a few hundred metres apart) are difficult to capture photographically since they are always in shadow.  The setting is magnificent, and the fact that (once again) we were the only tourists around added to the feeling of being at the ends of the earth.  We admired the falls, the dense primary forest and the birds before heading back to the car; sadly, the ticket seller, who had been absent on our arrival, had gotten to work while we were at the falls, and collared us for US$10 each on our return trip.  Terri quizzed him and he said that he hadn’t been paid his salary for 3 months, a common story among all government employees in the country this year.

When we got back to Stanley, we decided that we might as well use the admission ticket to see more of Nyangani Park.  We crawled back down the awful track to the main highway, then turned off again soon into another section of the national park.  Again we were the only tourists in the entire campground, and had the place to ourselves.  We had electric power and ran our fan heater, but sadly the power went out that evening, the coldest night of our trip.  We awoke to frost on the ground and -1.5 degrees on our thermometer.

Terri and Xavier at Domboshawa

Luckily for us, it warmed up quickly, and we set off on our bicycles to the Chawomera fort ruins.  It was a rough track, so rough that the previous day we had tried to drive it in Stanley and had quickly turned back.  The ruins were farther away than we had been told, and we had almost given up hope when we finally saw a sign pointing to an unobtrusive hilltop beside the road.  The fort ruins were pretty tiny, but there was a small enclosure wall and some “pit structures” just below the fort that apparently had something to do with slavery.  It was an isolated, atmospheric spot and we enjoyed the excuse to go for a bike ride before breakfast in some pretty scenery.  On the horizon we could see the flat-topped bulk of Mt. Nyanga, the highest peak in the country, but apparently the park was enforcing a rule that would-be climbers need to take a guide (at $5 an hour) to attempt the easy walk to the summit, so we weren’t interested.  We returned to camp, ate a late breakfast and then drove towards Harare. 

Another Civilized Interlude in Harare

Domboshawa rhinoceros painting

It wasn’t far from Nyangani to the capital, but it took us a long time because finally our luck with Zimbabwean traffic police completely ran out.  From about 100 km out of Harare, we were stopped at least 10 times by police who were aggressive, rude and determined to find something to fine us for.  We paid $20 because our light illuminating the license plate wasn’t working (this was during the day!) and another $10 for our reverse lights not working.  Another police roadblock caught us a second time for the reverse lights, but fortunately you can’t be fined twice on the same day for the same offense so we waved our receipt from the first fine and got away.  We also had a patently bogus Mozambique-style “speeding” shakedown with a traffic cop waving a radar gun reading 81 km/h at us.  Since we had just left a construction zone, we weren’t going any faster than about 40 km/h, so we stood our ground and eventually the cops gave up.  We knew that the police were under pressure to collect enough fines to enable their salaries to be paid that month, so they were out in force all over the roads.

Bruce and his wonderful papier mache heads

We eventually made it into town and traversed Harare’s confusing maze of streets to the eastern suburb where my friend Bruce lives in great style in a big house on a huge piece of land.  We were let in by the gardener, did some much-needed laundry and awaited Bruce’s arrival from a work trip to Bulawayo.  We sat up chatting over wine until late, then turned in.

Bruce, Xavier and me in Harare

Our three days in Harare were a wonderful respite from life on the road.  We slept late, did yoga in the garden, admired the guineafowl that ran comically around the grounds, went out to dinner and drinks with Bruce at various local nightspots, attempted to get Stanley’s faults fixed (we got the license plate light fixed, but the reverse lights required a switch that was not to be found anywhere in Harare).  We had another run-in with traffic cops for a bogus rolling-stop violation that we eventually argued and wheedled our way out of.  We admired Bruce’s wonderfully distinctive paintings and masks, and went out to see more contemporary Zimbabwean art and more folk-inspired tourist art.  We bonded with Xavier, the indomitable Chihuahua who rules Bruce’s house, and took him out to the impressive San rock art site of Domboshawa, which was similar in skill to the Nswatugi paintings, but with different animals (notably white rhinos).  We also rode our bikes to the Zimbabwe Parks authority and managed to negotiate a booking for two nights of camping in Mana Pools National Park; the initial quote was a crazy US$115 a night just for camping fees, but eventually the capable ladies running the booking office found us a stand-by site for US$44, still steep but a lot more affordable.

Wonderful Domboshawa lizard

Mana Pools:  A Zimbabwean Eden

It was hard to tear ourselves away from the creature comforts of life at Bruce’s, but on Saturday, July 2^nd we got up early and drove away at 7 am, hoping to escape the snares of the traffic police.  Amazingly, we had no encounters with police all day; perhaps having made their ticket quotas for June at the end of the month, they were lying low at the beginning of July.  Or maybe they had been told to take it easy after no less a figure than the Speaker of Parliament complained publicly about the depredations of the traffic police on ordinary Zimbabwean drivers.  At any rate, we drove easily and quickly on nearly-deserted early morning roads towards the Zambian border.  At Morangora village we stopped and did paperwork for our park stay, then turned off onto the worst road of the trip so far, a dirt track so completely corrugated that it’s impossible to drive on it without rattling everything loose on your car and on your body.  When we stopped at the park gate to sign in, we found that one front indicator had rattled loose and was hanging on by its wire, while an entire front fender panel had shaken loose and out of position.  Worse, our battery had shaken itself loose and one of its leads had come off, so that when we went to restart the engine, there was no electrical power at all.  Luckily that was easy to fix, but it was a reminder of how hard these horrible washboard tracks can be to vehicle longevity.

Modern Zimbabwean art portraying elephant poaching

Luckily Mana Pools was worth the pain of getting there.  Our campsite was right on the Zambezi River, staring out across the river at Zambia.   The sunsets and sunrises over the river were exquisitely beautiful, and the campsite was quiet, dark and full of the noises of nearby animals.  Mana Pools is famous for allowing tourists to walk around alone among the animals (although last year they introduced an extra US$15 a day “walking permit”; this doesn’t seem to be enforced at all, so if we were ever to go back, I wouldn’t buy the “walking permit”  and would take my chances with the rangers.  Terri and I spent the next day, our last full day in Zimbabwe, walking around the park, checking out the impalas, warthogs, hippos, crocodiles and abundant birdlife.  We heard lions without meeting any (fortunately), but saw no sign of cheetahs and leopards.  We saw a few elephants and kept a prudent distance from them.  The highlights for me were the pools themselves, isolated oxbow lakes that are absolutely bursting with hippos and crocodiles.  It was a memorable, slightly nerve-wracking day that ended, once again, with a fiery sunset over the Zambezi.

Gnarled old tree trunk at Mana Pools

On Monday July 4^th we drove back out over the horrible bone-jarring track to the main road and turned right towards the border.  Zimbabwe had a final sting in its tail for us as the Zimbabwean and Zambian customs officials contrived to shake us down for an extra US$ 40 in bribes since we didn’t have a police clearance letter from South Africa stating that the car wasn’t stolen.  It was an unpleasant way to leave the country, but somehow appropriate, given the state of the country.

Final Thoughts on Zimbabwe

I really enjoyed Zimbabwe.  I found the people that I met and conversed with to be well-informed, well-educated and amazingly stoic in their outlook despite living in a train wreck of a political and economic system.  Zimbabwe is always full of reminders of how the country once was, a thriving agricultural and industrial powerhouse that has slowly been ground down by Robert Mugabe’s autocratic 36-year rule.  While we were there, the cash shortages that have plagued the country for months became really acute, with lineups of over 100 people snaking along the block outside every ATM we saw, as people queue to withdraw the pitifully small amount they are permitted every week.  The country’s dollarization in 2008 helped end the incredible hyperinflation that destroyed the Zimbabwe dollar, but it has had the effect of pegging Zimbabwean prices to a far higher price than any of its neighbouring countries and competitors, particularly South Africa.  Zimbabwe’s industries and farms just can’t compete on price with South Africa, Botswana or anywhere else.  The country’s industries are mostly idle; Bulawayo’s factory belt is a ghost town, and all the workers in the Matopo Hills who used to work in those factories are back home, unemployed and trying to eke out a subsistence living on their farms.  The once-booming commercial farm sector is almost extinct thanks to populist but disastrous land-redistribution schemes that gave the land to rich ZANU-PF politicians who were uninterested in farming.  The country’s balance of payments is abysmal, with imports more than double exports this year.  The economy is crumbling, and a US embassy political official I spoke to thought that the economy would completely grind to a halt by October.

Fish eagle at Mana Pools

Essentially everyone is waiting for President Mugabe to die; at 92, he hasn’t got too many years left.  The problem is that nobody knows who will succeed him.  Will it be one of his two vice-presidents, or will it be his young and ruthlessly ambitious second wife Grace?  Zimbabweans have managed to survive this long by staying out of overt opposition to Mugabe, but there are signs that this year will be different.  An online anti-Mugabe rant by a pastor, Evan Mawarire, went viral on social media and spawned the #thisflag movement that is pushing for Mugabe’s removal from office.  Not long after we passed through Beitbridge, a government attempt suddenly to stop most imports across that border led to a serious riot in which cross-border traders went berserk and threatened to kill the chief customs officer.

Burnished copper tones on the hippo-filled Zambezi at Mana Pools

Two days after we left Zimbabwe, a stay-at-home protest across the country led some to predict the imminent demise of the Mugabe government.  It hasn’t happened yet, and it may not happen, but Zimbabwe certainly feels like a country on the brink of a meltdown.  Stay tuned to see how it all turns out.  In the meantime, by all means visit the country; the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe need all the support they can get!  It must be said, though, that Zimbabwe's use of the US dollar makes it significantly more expensive than neighbouring countries, so don't spend too, too long here unless your wallet needs to be lightened!

Next post I will describe the Zambia/Malawi leg of the trip, which is still going on as I write.  With luck I will be able to bring the blog completely up to date!

Sunset over the Zambezi at Mana Pools