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.
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| 48th birtday feast in Maun--thanks Terri! |
After my birthday celebrations on
September 13th, 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Southern carmine bee-eaters |
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| 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
19th, 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Apparently these facial markings help shed heat? |
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| 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.
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| Terri at Kori campsite |
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| The slender mongoose who enlivened our Kori campsite |
Friday, September 23rd
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Kori bustard |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 28th
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.
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| 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 29th
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 50th
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| You lookin' at me? |
The next morning, Monday, October
3rd, 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.
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| 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.
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| Yellow mongooses are irresistably cute! |
