24 Magical Hours in Chobe

Martigny, April 25th

I have been on a number of memorable African wildlife-spotting safaris in the past.  When my family lived in Tanzania in 1981-82 we took a trip through the Serengeti Plains, Ngorongoro Crater and Lake Manyara that will be forever seared in my memory.  We visited our local park, Mikumi, several times.  I went back to Tanzania in 1995 when my sister Audie was working as a lion researcher in the Serengeti and got to experience the wildebeest migration there in all its vast glory.  I visited mountain gorillas in Zaire on the same trip, as well as wild, unhabituated chimpanzees in Uganda.  I thought that I had seen the best that Africa had to offer in terms of wildlife, and so I was not necessarily expecting a mind-blowing encounter with Africa when I accompanied Terri, Angela and the 15 students from Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland to Chobe National Park in Botswana.  I had barely heard of the name of Chobe, and assumed that it was an average, run of the mill sort of national park.

African darter in mid-flight

How very, very wrong I was.  The 24 hours we spent in Chobe were an astonishing feast for the senses and for the mind, and provide a rare glimmer of hope in the often gloomy world of African wildlife conservation.  I was absolutely overwhelmed by the diversity and number of big animals and birds that we saw, and now I wonder if we will ever top this experience as we travel, over the next few months, around the continent of Africa.

Pied kingfisher

We started with an hour-long bus ride on Saturday, March 26^th from Livingstone to the strange border crossing at Kazungula, where the four countries of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana meet at a single point (OK, in the middle of the Zambezi River, but still at a point).  The drive took us through Mosi Oa Tunya (the local name for Victoria Falls) National Park and past a string of expensive lodges, many of them specializing in fishing, strung out along the river.  We passed a few giraffe and impala and baboons, but there were no great herds to be seen from the highway.  On either side of the park we passed villages that looked even more poverty-stricken than Ngwenya, where we had just spent a week working on our humanitarian project.  The houses looked more picturesque than in Livingstone as they were made of adobe and wood, but the surrounding fields looked parched by the drought that has blighted this year’s corn crop in Zambia and the rest of southern Africa. 

Hippopotami

As we approached the border crossing, a huge lineup of trucks appeared on the side of the road, stretching several kilometres to the ferry.  The main ferry had capsized in strong currents a few days before, and now a tiny pontoon capable of carrying one or two trucks at a time was trying futilely to keep up with demand.  Most of the trucks were carrying copper south towards South African ports, although to my surprise almost none of the copper was from the Zambian mines in the Copperbelt.  Almost all of these mines have closed temporarily due to the low world price for copper, dealing a hammer blow to the Zambian economy.  Instead this copper came from across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); have you ever noticed that any country that feels impelled to call itself a Democratic Republic almost never is (North Korea, East Germany and DRC spring to mind)?  In fact even Republic may be a misnomer for the failed state that is DRC.  Their transport system and governance are so miserable that the copper mines choose to truck their product through four countries and across three international borders rather than to move it through DRC itself to the Atlantic Ocean.

Carefree elephants in the water

We were unaffected by the ferry woes as we had a private motorboat picking us up.  We said goodbye for 24 hours to Mr. Sakala and his trusty bus and clambered aboard the launch.  In a few minutes we had been processed into Botswana (my 124^th country) and were in the back of two Toyota Land Cruisers that had been turned into open-top safari vehicles, headed to the nearby town of Kasane.  The differences with Zambia that were visible on this ten-minute drive were stark.  Houses were much more solidly built, with many private cars parked in driveways.  The roads were in immaculate condition, and prosperous-looking shops lined the main street.  People were well-dressed and were moving purposefully through the streets, with little of the enforced idleness that is so evident on Zambian streets.  We pulled up at the headquarters of Kalahari Tours, had a brief breakfast and then headed out on a boat cruise along the Chobe River.

Hey big ears!

The boat cruise was magnificent.  Late March is high water on the Zambezi and Chobe Rivers.   Despite the continuing drought, the rivers were running very high since they are fed by rains in the uplands of western Zambia and Angola.  We floated along reed-filled marshes that were full of colourful birds like rollers, bee-eaters and kingfishers, as well as bigger species like herons, egrets, cormorants and African fish eagles.  We had a great time spotting birds for the first hour or so before the big game showed up slightly upstream.

Family outing

Malachite kingfisher

Botswana is one of the few great success stories in African conservation.  Elephants in particular are doing better here than in any other countries.  Roughly speaking there are 600,000 African elephants left in the wild, with their numbers constantly dwindling due to the depredations of illegal ivory poachers.  Botswana can boast 250,000 of those, or nearly half of all the continent’s elephants, and Chobe alone has 130,000, or something like 22 percent of the total.  Much of this success is due to the vigorous anti-poaching efforts of the army and the park authorities.  As we entered the park, we passed a large anti-poaching camp run by the army.  With the huge money to be made in the wildlife trade, only a full-bodied armed presence seems to be enough to deter poachers. 

Never smile at a crocodile

Angela, despite growing up in South Africa, had somehow never seen an elephant in the wild, and was worried that she would jinx the rest of us.  Instead, we had an absolutely elephant-filled day, as we passed herds of twenty, thirty or even fifty elephants.  They were mostly feeding and walking beside the river, but many of them were in the river, swimming and bathing and generally having a great time.  As Terri pointed out, the herd did a good job of keeping the numerous young elephants safe in the midst of the group, constantly reassuring them with touches of the trunk.  It was an awe-inspiring sight to see so many elephants in one place; I had seen elephants numerous times before, but never in such quantities.

Babboon babies look cuter than the adults!

Even in the 1980s the ivory poachers were carving bloody swathes through wild populations and numbers were dwindling in Tanzania.  Here in Chobe, I felt as though I was in the land of the elephants, and it was intoxicating.  I particularly liked watching the elephants emerge from the river, glistening in the sunshine, trunks flopping about as they trotted up the bank.

There was more to see than just elephants, majestic though they were.  Pods of hippos, ten or fifteen strong, lolled in the river or were occasionally seen grazing on the shore.  There were scatterings of big buffalo and the occasional Nile crocodile.  Meanwhile the birdlife continued to astound.  It was hard to tear ourselves away to return to shore for a huge buffet lunch.

I've got my eye set on you...

That afternoon we went out on a game drive in our two Land Cruisers.  Our route led largely along the river and we saw a lot of the same elephants from a different perspective, but we were also lucky with other species.  I was ecstatic to run into a pack of African wild dogs, a little-studied species that has been driven to near-extinction in much of the continent by canine distemper.

Wild dog

We passed large numbers of impala as well as their larger cousins the puku (a new species for me).  Giraffe were everywhere, and we ran into banded mongooses.  The undeniable highlight, however, was watching a pride of 8 lions, mostly juveniles, hunting for kudu.  The hunt was unsuccessful, but watching the big cats stalking under the watchful gaze of an older female was unforgettable.

Spot the giraffe

Hornbill

We drove out along the river towards our evening’s campsite.  The sun was sinking, and we paused once to watch a magnificent sunset over the Chobe River with flocks of Egyptian geese darkening the sky.  We got to the campsite, already set up by the tour company, and tucked into a delicious meal around a crackling fire.  The night was perfectly clear, and I took the Kumon students out of the light of the campfire to look at the magnificent southern skies on a moonless night and to try to blow their minds with some of the huge numbers, sizes and distances of the universe.  That night we fell asleep in our tents to the muffled sounds of nearby animals, including hyenas and elephants, and woke up once in the night when a passing animal of some sort brushed against the canvas of our tents.

Young lion on the hunt

A reflecting elephant

Sunset

Morning began early, with breakfast at 5:30 and a departure by 5:50.  We set off in the pre-dawn chill and stopped after half an hour or so to watch a sunset that was equal in splendour to the previous evening’s sunset.  Our big species sightings that day were two bands of hyenas hunting (one pack had the remnants of an impala) and a few silverback jackals hanging around the hyenas in hopes of a few scraps.

Sunrise

We also saw more mongooses, both banded and brown-tailed (???), and a magnificently muddy buffalo wallowing beside the road.  And then, suddenly and too soon, we were back at the park gate by 7:50 and back at the border crossing a few minutes later, crossing back into Zambia.  Although we were glad to see Mr. Sakala waiting for us, the contrast between the order and prosperity in Botswana and the more shambolic poverty of Zambia was striking.  Mr. Sakala’s bus had a slight smell of gasoline in it from having transported back a supply of smuggled Botswanan fuel for his taxi and his son’s car; the fuel shortages in Zambia seemed not to be abating.

Banded Mongooses

I think that the three factors that combined to make our safari so perfect were the sheer number of elephants; the amazing bird life (we saw three times the number of species in Chobe in 24 hours than we had seen in Livingstone in the previous 16 days) and the wonderful light reflecting on the river, making the pictures much more vivid.  It left me hungry for more amazing safaris, this time with our own wheels on our upcoming trip through Southern Africa. 

Silverbacked Jackals

I’m also glad to see that Botswana is getting it right in important ways.  Rather than succumbing to the dreaded “resource curse” that has done for Nigeria, DRC, Angola, Equatorial Guinea and other countries, Botswana has used its big diamond mines to develop the entire country and encourage widespread prosperity, good health care and education and a well-functioning government.  As well, it has done better than almost any other African country at maintaining its natural heritage and wildlife.  There are a lot of other countries that could learn a lot from Botswana!

One happy buffalo!

My next post will be about the plans for our upcoming overland driving trip.  Stay tuned!!