Botswana 2024
Westward To Botswana: Dirty Shoes And Itchy Feet
Before we start this next post, a shock update. A first for us, we’ve decided we’re not going to complete this trip and we’re going to head home early. There’s a variety of reasons, maybe we’ll detail them when we do a “trip conclusion” post later. We’re cutting the adventure short, which means not doing Namibia, nor, regrettably, Cape Town – but those places remain very much on the wish list. So we’ll be heading home to England in early October rather than mid November which was the original plan. Well maybe that way we’ll have time for another trip before Christmas….
Ever since we began travelling together with a trip to Dubrovnik in 2011, we’ve kept a list of each town, city and village outside of GB in which we’ve stayed – not everywhere that we’ve visited but everywhere where we’ve stayed at least one night. Nyanga is number 300, so something of a statistical landmark, memorable not really because of that pedestrian fact but more because the hotel we stayed in was so badly run that we dubbed it “Beyond Fawlty Towers”. We may have to go into more detail on that some other time but wow what a shambles of a place.
It’s a long drive across Zimbabwe from east to west, so we take an overnight break in the town of Gweru, just under six hours into the drive. We don’t see too much of Gweru, but from the little that we do see it’s an attractive place filled with jacaranda lined avenues and sturdy walls draped high with bougainvillea. There’s some heavy industry too, but the centre looks very attractive, as do the beer tables at our lodge – maybe just a little too attractive, and we fall for the attraction. Nice beer. Nice wine. Another double Amarula, ma’am? Oh, go on then…on the rocks please….
From Gweru it’s just a couple of hours on the road back to Bulawayo, where we hand back the car keys and settle once again into the Bulawayo Club in which the guy on reception hands me back one of my essential travel buddies, my little Sony speaker. Never before have I left the little fellow behind – uncanny isn’t it that the first time I do so, it’s at a place where we’re already committed to return just a week later. Another slice of our regular good fortune. We do get lucky, there’s no doubting it.
Boarding the bus in the middle of Bulawayo it’s hard to push the memories of the horrible journey in Zambia to the back of our minds, but of course lightning doesn’t strike twice and today everything is fine. Crossing borders between countries by road transport is always interesting, and we’re prepared for a bit of fun as we move out of Zimbabwe and into Botswana. Exit from the first is swift and easy, entry to the second a little more time consuming, especially with the shoe thing.
Now, we have already heard that to enter Botswana, on top of the customary passport stamping and equally customary kowtowing to po-faced officials, there is a slightly offbeat requirement to walk through a muddy puddle which is presumably some sort of antidote to spreading disease. Like the Foot & Mouth thing years ago. Fair enough, no sweat. However, what nobody told us is that this is a requirement not just for the shoes we are wearing, but for all of the shoes in our luggage too. Just imagine for a moment standing out in the open, undoing your backpack and digging out every shoe from every obscure corner, disturbing all the carefully packed items and exposing everything you own to the watching world. And then, as if that’s not enough, stuffing the newly dipped shoes back in amongst your clean clothing with wet mud still dripping from the soles. Hello Botswana.
Border crossings are such fun huh. A short time later the bus drops us in Francistown, a city with a gold rush history up there with California’s 49ers, a place which owes its very existence, and in fact its name, to the history of pursuit of that precious metal. Appropriate then that we’re staying at the Diggers Inn. Francistown was in fact the site of Southern Africa’s very first gold rush – the Francis in question was an English prospector.
We pondered weeks ago whether the onward journey from Malawi would see a gradual progression in such things as infrastructure and modernisation, but thus far the transition has been sporadic rather than progressive. Now there’s Francistown, where we feel as if we’ve made a sudden leap back into a world which we as Europeans recognise, a world which looks more like home than anywhere we’ve seen in 10 weeks. Shopping malls, paved streets, classy clothes shops, steak houses and chain retailers all vie for business, giving Francistown the distinct look of a European town. Everywhere has wifi; the 4G signal which never made a single appearance anywhere in Zimbabwe is present as soon as we’re over the border. It feels almost as if we’ve left Africa.
Botswana is one of the African continent’s better performers, politically, economically and, since a measure of success in conquering the AIDS epidemic, health wise too. Francistown seems to show all of this, its confident, brisk air feeling a million miles away from most places we’ve visited on this journey. It’s hard to believe that we’re only 120 miles from Bulawayo. Life is very different here, evidenced by the fact that more and more Zimbabweans are migrating here in search of a better life. With only 2.5 million inhabitants in a country the size of France, there’s undoubtedly room for them.
If Francistown looks like a European town as we take our first stroll, then it feels like one too – it’s cold! Our arrival here has coincided with an abnormally cold snap, temperatures in the low teens and chilly gusting winds have got the locals scrambling for their quilted jackets and grumbling that this is not normal. We haven’t seen the Diggers Inn receptionists without a large coat yet, even though they work indoors. These guys aren’t used to this!
Despite its golden history and not unconnected status as a major transport hub, Francistown has very few places of interest. We’ve probably allowed too many days here and now find ourselves filling time with forward planning, admin and housekeeping, including getting that mud off our clothes. It’s perhaps not surprising that most travellers pass through quickly. Even the town’s museum is extremely understated, consisting mostly of written commentaries and old photographs rather than objects and artefacts.
It does though have one nice touch: photographs of buildings when gold mining was thriving, coupled with chronological shots of the same buildings as the heyday waned and those buildings slowly became neglected, and ultimately derelict. Most of these are based around the mining industry and the railways which enabled the mines to succeed. The largest, the Monarch Mine, unearthed over 5,000 kilograms of gold through its life cycle. Mining continues but these days is more copper and nickel than gold, though the town nevertheless feels successful despite the gold running out, new successes evidently replacing the original one.
There’s nothing much wrong with Francistown, but there’s not much to excite the traveller here, either, and by the second full day time is starting to pass slowly. We’re kicking our heels. As we sit back in our room at the Diggers Inn, filling an afternoon hour, a Monkees track comes on the music shuffle…
“What am I doin’ hangin’ round
I should be on that train and gone
I should be ridin’ on that train to San Antone
What am I doin’ hangin’ round”
I sometimes think music shuffles have a second sight.
Northwards To Maun And The Okavango Delta
Francistown, whilst there’s nothing exactly wrong with it, isn’t the world’s most exciting place and we’ve been kicking our heels a bit, spending three and a half days in a town where you can probably see everything worth seeing between breakfast and lunchtime. Maybe though, our three days have seemed lengthened by anticipation, for when we leave here we will be heading for somewhere which was always planned to be one of the highlights of the whole trip.
To herald our last night in Francistown, the very first invasive mosquito of the entire trip makes an appearance and clearly wants to be tonight’s star, whining its way past our ears and around our heads, goading us to respond. The little beast keeps whining in like a bomber plane and then going into hiding, creating an aura in which despite being on full mosquito alert all we can hear is the ceiling fan which makes precisely the te-pokka te-pokka te-pokka sound which would send Walter Mitty into a world of fantasy. It doesn’t do the same for us, it just makes us concentrate even more on listening for the telltale whine of the little shit which wants our blood. We sausage roll ourselves in our sheets and he doesn’t, thankfully, succeed. I hope he died hungry.
Next morning we’re down early to the bus station for one of Africa’s acquired tastes, a 7-hour ride in a rickety minibus rammed with people, luggage and parcels where once you’re in place there’s no opportunity to adjust your position, everything and everyone is just too tightly packed. Legs stuck, feet immobile, spine contorted, body rigid. By the time we’re set free we’re beginning to know what rigor mortis feels like. A red faced Michaela is so overheated that she says it feels like she’s having five menopausal flushes all at once.
To be fair to the bus guys though, they take the time as we approach destination to ask us precisely where we’re staying and then drop us no more than two minutes walk from the door. Plus, we paid about £9 each for this trip of nearly 500 kilometres we really shouldn’t complain. And hey, it’s all part of the Africa experience.
Where we have in fact just arrived is the riverside town of Maun (pronounced Maa-oon), gateway to the famous Okavango Delta, the world’s largest inland delta, and we’re excited about what will now be the last big adventure of this trip. Maun is a stretched out, sprawling town which exists under a covering of sand brought in by the delta waters and blown from the Kalahari, and the baking sun which had briefly disappeared in Francistown. The ever present drought is again very visible; our first lodge is described as “waterside” but is probably 300 yards from the edge of the currently feeble Thamalakane River with the tufted grass of dry riverbed filling the space in between. After two nights/one day in Maun we are soon away from town and off on the adventure.
We may have opted to curtail this trip but we are very much up for what promises to be another great experience, we’re expecting to end on a high. Our first base for exploring Okavango is the Boteti Tented Camp, way off the tarmac roads and several miles into the bush. This is dry land of deep pale sand and skeletal winter trees; it’s winter but boy is it hot, the thermometers are nudging 40 degrees and the occasional breeze feels like someone has opened a very large oven door. Just 500 kilometres and three days on from the big quilted coats of Francistown, everything in the “tent” is hot to the touch, even the toilet seat, as Michaela has just discovered with a yelp.
The wide Boteti River alongside the camp is completely gone, just another stretch of pale sand between the lines of trees which are the only clues as to its existence. We keep hearing that this extreme dry season is having a devastating effect on the animals as it gets harder and harder to find water, no surprise when a river of this size is completely dry.
We look out from the front of our new home at the camp, across land which is virtually devoid of colour, the sand so pale as to be almost the grey of cement powder, everything in sight dusted by its powdery grains and so matching its deadened palour. The barren lifeless trees have no brown to their bark, no green leaves to their branches, some pale tree trunks are stripped bare of bark altogether. Birds in winter plumage sit in camouflage, matching almost perfectly their colourless domain. All is dusted grey. Silence reigns, the relentless sun beats down. Nature is in stasis, waiting patiently for rain.
At our meeting time of 4:45am next day, well before sunrise, the ubiquitous greyness appears white in the gloom which, coupled with the skeletal trees, gives the uncanny appearance of a frosty morning back home, yet another incongruity in the early heat of a new day. There’s excitement in the air as we head out into the darkness in the safari jeep with our companions for the day, a mother and daughter from Sydney, and our driver guide Kay. A big orange ball of sunrise pins the bony trees to the glare in ghostly silhouettes. The temperature rises quickly even at this hour, warm air rushes through the open sides of the jeep as we move from tarmac to dirt roads and on towards the gates of the Moremi Game Reserve within the incredible Okavango Delta.
The day unfolds in style: we will probably never repeat the high drama of the Kenya safaris, but Moremi gives it a pretty good go with giraffes, elephants, warthogs making their appearance, together with one solitary lion, fazed by the hot sun and too whacked to do anything but sleep in a patch of shade. Antelopes of many types run when startled, hurdling shrubs and channels with leaps which combine athleticism, grace and humour, among the sightings our first ever springbok.
Elephants are doing well in Botswana, their population currently numbering 150,000 and growing by some 7.5% per year, an acceptable percentage of whom obligingly make themselves visible to our group today. Moremi is vast and open, and less touristed than the likes of Maasai Mara, making sightings perhaps less regular but certainly no less thrilling. Giant elephants protect their young, giraffes strain for the tastiest leaves, kudu and impala meet our stares with inquisitive eyes and twitching ears. Peering from behind shrubs, two kori bustards, the male of which is believed to be the world’s heaviest creature capable of flight, strut off into the bush with a swagger in keeping with its status as Botswana’s national bird.
Yet all the while alongside these fabulous sights, it’s the very land itself which is capable of capturing the imagination just as much. Here we sit, being driven across these parched, sand covered lands, between these stark winter trees, where everything is arid and crying out for water, knowing that in another season, this entire area is underwater or marshland. Okavango’s annual story, its character, its very existence, is truly remarkable. This place really is one of the world’s greatest natural phenomena.
More on just what makes the Okavango Delta quite so incredible to follow in our next post….
Okavango & Makgadikgadi: Days In Amazing Places
The outdoor shower at Boteti Tented Camp takes us aback, not because of its temperature but more due to its extreme saltiness, so saline as to give off a sea-like odour and leave the skin feeling pinched once dried. If this in itself is hardly an Earth shattering fact, the point that it is part of the unique topography of this area just adds to the mystique and intrigue we are already feeling as we gear up to explore more of our amazing surroundings.
The natural phenomenon which is the Okavango Delta is full of features which are utterly fascinating and in some instances unique. Its annual story is this. The waters of the Cuito and Cubango Rivers swell to form the Okavango River, emanating from sources in Angola then flowing eventually into northern Botswana, growing in size as the rains of the wet season gather and flow with more and more power. As the huge volumes of water disperse into the lowlands they form the Okavango, the World’s largest inland delta, covering at its yearly peak an incredible 7,500 square miles.
This vast, almost unimaginable area is turned into a mixture of shallow water, lakes, marshlands and wetlands, submerging the previously desert like sands beneath its inexorable reach. What really makes this a unique place is that there’s no outflow, no exit river, no pathway to the ocean. Instead, this incredible volume of water, estimated to total at its height some 2.5 trillion gallons, is for the most part absorbed by the sands of the Kalahari Desert, the remainder evaporated by the blazing sun. Two and a half trillion gallons of water largely vanishes and the arid lands of winter return.
The huge water flow attracts massive numbers of birds and mammals, as do the fresh grasses, reeds and green shrubs which thrive as the waters engulf the terrain. Some 400+ species of bird are resident here, while tens of thousands of mammals come to wallow in its depths or drink its essential quality. Unbelievably, those 7,500 square miles will over the months shrink to less than 2,000 in an ordinary dry season. In a drought ridden dry season like the current one, levels are at a testing minimum.
What an amazing place, to be two such radically different settings at different times of year. For observers, the waters at their height bring migrating birds in their millions, whereas the dry season brings the animals to those areas of water which remain, grouping together sizeable herds in search of lifeblood. For the ever present humans, the greater part of the water supply is from boreholes – hence the extreme saltiness as salts from evaporated water penetrate the ground below and find the sunken supplies.
Following on from our day in Moremi, our next sortie is out on to those waters which remain, punted through the reed and weed filled channels in a boat known as a mokoro, a kind of canoe operated by poling. Our poler, who calls himself KK, glides us gracefully through those narrow channels, occasionally drifting across wider pools, eagerly pointing out wading birds, raptors and hippos along the way.
Hauling the mokoro on to an island bank, we hike for 90 minutes or so among zebras and giraffes, impala and hyena, avoiding the many holes dug by aardvark until we eventually reach a pool deep enough for a large pod of hippos to wallow and now and again indulge in a session of loud grunting. The eyes of crocodiles occasionally peer up above the surface. As the mokoro makes its way back through the channels after a picnic lunch, the afternoon sun is so powerful that even KK is struggling – I have to lend him a shirt as a makeshift head covering, so distressed is he by the physical effort of poling in the extreme heat.
Bidding farewell to a KK relieved to be back on dry land, we travel back in the jeep along the sandy dirt roads, still marvelling that this desert like scenery will become flooded marshland in a few months time. For long stretches the only green trees are the acacia so loved by the giraffes, the rest is barren and dry – dusty, sandy and lifeless. Dotting the landscape are the amazing termite mounds, so tall and pinnacled that from a distance they resemble the church spires of English villages.
The forests of wintry trees stretch for mile upon mile, yet are never dense, the competition for water leading Mother Nature to leave spaces between trees in order to increase each one’s chances of survival. Those respectful distances and the independent trees give the forests the look of plantations, maybe orchards, such is the amount of territory granted to each one.
From Boteti Tented Camp we move to the nicely named Leopard Plains Camp, to journey into the Makgadikgadi National Park where we pick up another section of the mighty but dry Boteti River. Our new guide Alex takes us way beyond even well used tracks, through deep sand byways that only experienced 4WD operators could negotiate, to those sections of the riverbed where occasional pools of stagnant water are trapped between sandbanks, providing refuge for more large herds of exotic beasts. Zebra, wildebeest, elephants and antelopes of many types share the meagre supply.
These guys are finding ways to survive: lapping the waters in the heat of the day, devouring foliage wherever they can find it, or in the case of carnivores snaring prey and then resting for long periods after consumption. Impala, other antelopes and wildebeest add calcium to their diet by chomping on the dry bones of those who have succumbed to either predators or the heat – nature is endlessly resourceful.
Just north of here are the Makgadikgadi Pans, one of the World’s largest areas of salt pans and a spectacular sight. In truth we thought our safari day was taking us here but disappointingly it doesn’t and, as a result, we won’t, unfortunately, get to see them now.
Startlingly cold nights separate these hot, exciting days, the temperature plummeting immediately after sundown. By 6:30pm it’s hard to believe it was so hot just two hours earlier; by 8:30 it’s obvious why the lodge owners provide big heavy blankets in the tents. It’s mighty cold in the desert, you know. Early mornings call for extra layers of clothing as the deep orange sunrise illuminates the stark trees and the air fills with any number of exotic bird calls. Such cold nights bring clear skies, and with virtually no light pollution we are treated to star filled scenes with a clearly visible Milky Way. Gazing at the wonderful night sky is just a little bit magical.
On the first of our two nights at Leopard Plains, an absolute delight. The last day of September is Botswana’s Independence Day and we are treated to a traditional celebration meal around the campfire, shared with the owners and the other guests, after which camp staff sing heartfelt songs with typically beautiful African harmonies drifting out from the darkness and on through the flames of the fire. Once again, it’s all more than a little bit magical. Our flesh tingles as we soak up just exactly where we are, what we are experiencing; one of those unforgettable moments of travel. It’s for moments like this that we venture so far.
October 2nd, Wednesday. The night sky was even more superb last night, shooting stars bringing another joy to the jewelled darkness; we just stood and gazed until our necks ached. Now as the birds and squirrels chatter their first words of the day, the huge orange sun rises once again behind the trees to send long spiny shadows across the sand. A couple of nervous impala visit the waterhole, eyes upon us as they drink, hornbills with their elongated bodies squawk and swoop from perch to perch. Guinea fowl hurry comically across the sand, warbling their strange language as they scratch for scraps in the dust. Forty degree heat is but a few hours away, yet for now our thoughts turn to an extra layer of clothing and a hot coffee.
The chill air will soon be gone. As, indeed, will we, heading back now to Maun, our final call before starting the long journey home. Africa is ending our time here by slipping its arms around our shoulders and kissing our cheeks with a fond farewell. Come back soon, she says.