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.
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| 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.
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| Pied kingfisher |
We started with an hour-long bus
ride on Saturday, March 26th 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.
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| 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.
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Carefree elephants in the water
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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.
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| 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.
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Family outing
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Malachite kingfisher
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Spot the giraffe |
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| 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.
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Young lion on the hunt
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| A reflecting elephant |
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Sunset
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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Silverbacked Jackals
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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!
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| One happy buffalo! |
My next post will be about the
plans for our upcoming overland driving trip.
Stay tuned!!
