Postcard #2 -- Botswana, Africa
BOTSWANA, 
Formerly a British protectorate,
uncrowded, at least with people, elephants perhaps another story. With an area almost as large as
Here in the north of the country we found only a couple of middling
towns and some scattered villages. The
only traffic problems involve other game drive vehicles, and even these proved
thankfully rare.
One such encounter, involving only one other vehicle and six
to eight other tourists with guide, occurred in a most unlikely place–the
Kalahari, on the edge of the Makgadikgadi Pans, the world’s largest salt pans.
Out just after sunrise, we sought what our camp guide billed as “meerkats in
the morning.” The camp’s trusty meerkat
scout unable to locate the usual band, we joined another camp’s vehicle,
producing our rare morning, 2-vehicle traffic jam.
These creatures define the term adorable. Unafraid of
humans and highly social, they cooperate by taking turns as lookout, mostly for
birds of prey. One or more are always
standing upright on hind legs scanning the sky.
And when people cooperate by sitting nearby on the relatively flat ground,
they may climb up a person’s back to sit on a hat or shoulders for a better
view. Needless to say we shot up a lot
of digital storage capacity on this morning.
Even the presence of another tour group proved no distraction, as each
group took turns pausing for morning tea. Very civilized.
Thuto and a Meerkat Marci and a Meerkat Giraffes
On our return to camp we detoured to Jacobson’s Baobab
tree, a huge multi-trunked specimen, said to be the only landmark visible from
out in the pans. Nearby we passed a
couple of cattle posts, a traditional feature of
life, and while most people reside in villages, each family has a cattle post
some distance away, with corrals and basic shelter.
Kalahari camp, our last and easily the most luxurious
since the River Club, offered huge tents with concrete floors, real beds and an
outdoor but adjoining shower and flush toilet–a whole different level of
comfort than Linyante, Savuti, or our previous camp in the Okavango Delta.
On an island accessible only by boat, seasonal Xigera (
pronounced something like KEY-jera) Camp had pit toilets because septic tanks
are not permitted in the Game Reserve where we were located. Even in the midst of all this water the dust
prevailed. The
highlands, and after several months the water arrives at a very flat stretch of
Kalahari where it spreads out forming an enormous delta–a watery world in a
very arid place. The river’s flow supports perennial wetlands in the heart of
the Delta, while the fringes are seasonal.
This year proved wetter than normal, following several dry years.
Here, rather than game drives (no roads in the Delta) we
went on game walks and mokoro rides. And
because we’re in a national park (Moremi Game Reserve) Thuto could not carry a
gun. Instead, he carried a stick–and
we’re thinking, “not much use against an irritated elephant.” And we did encounter one female pachyderm
with calf who gave us a sort of a mock charge, as Thuto told us all to scramble
up behind a nearby termite mound.
On another walk Thuto gave lessons on elephant dung. He explained that the round pellets we see
are undigested palm nuts. He says the
elephants love the nuts and do digest the outer husk, and that only after
passing through an elephant’s digestive tract can the nut germinate. Thuto illustrated the phenomenon by pointing
out the lines of palm trees marking elephant trails. A little later we cautiously approached a
small herd that Thuto described as one lone bull, plus several teenager
hangers-on. As they approached a small cluster of palms searching the ground
for nuts, the youngsters waited for the big bull to press his massive head
against a trunk and slowly shake the tree, causing it to shower the ground with
nuts.
Bushmen in the Kalahari Mokoro in the Okavango Delta
Our sundowners in the delta were imbibed on small islands
after short mokoro rides through the
reeds and tall grass with birds and frogs providing the background music,
punctuated by the occasional percussive grunt of a hippo. The sunsets here, as elsewhere in
consistently captivated us–the atmospheric dust acting like an orange-tinted
filter on the lens–though the effect resulted even with the naked eye.
We partook of another memorable sundowner on our last
safari evening out on a salt pan in the Kalahari. This one during the return from an ATV ride
out into the pans. (Can you picture Stu
& Janet on an ATV?) It took a few
minutes to get the hang of the machine, and to learn to keep a big separation
between ATVs when we were heading into the wind.
The sensation of being on an endless, featureless plain
can be disorienting. We tried an experiment
where we would stand looking at a pack on the ground maybe 150 feet away, try
to fix its location in our mind and then walk straight toward the pack with out
eyes closed. One of us came close, but
most of us veered rather sharply left or right and missed the target by 10 to
40 feet! And, one of us started walking in circles. These results were either
due to the absence of any landscape features preventing us from doing any
mental triangulation, or else we all had a hitch in our get-along which led us
off course, the absence of visual feed back not allowing corrections. We’re not going into the theories about
walking in circles.
Our last morning on safari we discovered another
dimension of the Kalahari–the Bushmen.
Three Bushmen or San, traditional inhabitants of the most inhospitable
regions of the Kalahari, led us on a walk. They conversed among themselves in
their amazing click language and the youngest (age 20) spoke good English and
served as translator. They pointed out hyena tracks from last night (we’re
within 100 yards of our camp), and several bushes to illustrate how roots,
bark, leaves and stems are all used to make tools, medicines or flavor
food. One is the source of poison for
arrows. Their small bow and arrows do
not look capable of killing much more than a hare but they say with the poison
they can bring down a giraffe! Their
poison is a neurotoxin that kills by paralysis, thus not tainting the meat,
save for a small area around the wound which they cut out.
Making fire in a few minutes using a stick and some dry
grass kindling; finding and digging a scorpion out of his burrow, explaining
that Bushmen entertain themselves with scorpion fights; and locating an edible
lily bulb by recognizing its dead brown tops amidst the surrounding dry grass,
were other highlights of our walk with these remarkable people, whose
traditional way of life is in serious jeopardy.
(We’re told its tough for a nomadic people to comply with mandatory
public school attendance laws.)
We returned from our walk with the Bushmen by late
morning and after a small plane flight from a strip near our camp to the main
northern town of
quick run into the souvenir shop, and a jet flight, six hours later we’re in
Happy Travels, Janet and Stu
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