June 29, 2011
I am sitting in the Gaborone Airport, in Botswana,
reflecting on the last two weeks. The feeling is rather surreal. I have
seen and experience more than I can process. I suppose with 5,200 photos
on my SD card I can process it a lot of it later. We have seen a lot.
Gaborone is the capital city of Botswana and stands in
stark contrast to the rest of the country, as far as development in concerned.
From the air, you can see a handful of skyscrapers downtown and western
style houses.
The Gaborone International Airport brags large, clean
glass walls, modern architecture and a new stylish looking layout. It is
an amusing comparison to the Maun Airport we flew out of this morning, which
looks like a rundown high school building converted into an airport. The
Maun Airport has a strong sense of “African Time” and organization. When we
arrived we discovered that our tickets had not been purchased. After an hour
and a half of panic and drama, we did finally get tickets in addition to yet
another laughably TIA [This Is Africa] Moment. (This is quite a common
expression in these parts standing used pretty much whenever anything absurd
with a uniquely African flavour occur. For example: being stuck on the highway
because a massive herd of elephants is crossing the road.)
I will try to summarize the events since we set out on
our road trip.
Monday June 13
We piled into our 4x4 and headed to Namibia, to catch
wild game with N’s Uncle. Uncle H.O. is a veterinarian who has built a unique
business working with Namibian ranchers to capture and transport their wild
game. These safari ranches are a significant contributor to the economy because
foreigners pay a lot to take a guide out and hunt on them. They also reduce
poaching and overpopulation. In order to keep the animal populations on their
land evenly disturbed and to prevent inbreeding ranchers buy and sell their
animals at large private auctions. In order to have an auction, you have to
catch the game. That’s where N’s uncle comes in.
The drive was relatively uneventful. N’s sister
flirted her way out of a speeding ticket within the first hour of our journey.
After roughly fifteen hours of driving, we stopped in Kanye and briefly
considered staying at the Savanna Lodge before decided that this was, “probably
a place where people die.”
The next day was another fifteen hours of driving, and
we reached, Namibia’s capital, Windhoek (pronounce Vin-took). N’s Dad
grew up in Namibia, and some of his siblings including this uncle still live
here. Namibia is a small German colony and the least densely populated country
in the world. It is a wild, windswept, lonely feeling place.
Wednesday June 15
We arrived at Safari Ranch owned by Peter and Utah
Klaussen, a very hospitable German couple. Safari Ranch is one of the largest
wild game farms in Namibia. Our time there was the highlight of the trip for
all of us. The game catching is a truly unique experience that only a handful
of N’s cousins and the farmers themselves have had.
By the time, we arrived they had already set up the
Bouma. The Bouma is a 10-15 ft. high tarp wall in the shape of a massive
funnel. It has a very wide opening at one end and then slowly narrows into a
small lane leading into shipping containers on semi-trucks. A helicopter finds
and chases herd of animals into the Bouma. Uncle H.O. has about twenty-three
men working for him catching game. Some of these workers chase the animals all
the way through the Bouma. As they pass other men pull curtains across the
Bouma so that the animals cannot turn around and run back. They chase them all
the way onto the trucks like this. It’s very dangerous work. Uncle H. O. stands
on top of the shipping containers to sedate the animals. They do not knock them
out just give them something to calm them enough that they will survive
transport and short term captivity for the auction. If they do not do this, the
animals kill each other in their panic. They handled the catches very humanely.
I was extremely impressed. I can hardly watch a rodeo it upsets me so much, but
I really enjoyed this mainly because the motivation behind it was to protect
these animal populations.
Each catch is a huge thrill! The first day (Wed)
they caught Sabel, Rone (that we hadn’t seen up until this point), Ostridges,
Black and Blue Wildebeest and Waterbuck. One of the Waterbuck jumped over the
Bouma walls from a near stand still. It flew over right next to N and scratched
his hand on its way over. He was pretty thrilled that he would have such a cool
story behind the scar.
In the evenings, Utah cooked us delicious German meals
(always including African venison). We ate with H.O. and Teddy (the Africans
helicopter pilot). Teddy kept us all entertained with his comments and stories.
Every time he took a bite of food he would exclaim “baie, biae, lekker!”
(“very, very good!” roughly translated) or “lekker, lekker, lekker!” Over the
next two days, he took each of us up in the chopper! It was an amazing experience.
It pretty much made my life! I loved it!
Thursday we caught Rone, Ostridges, Eland and Sesibee.
Sesibee's are relatively small, but in their panic they will brutalize one
another with their sharp pointy horns. Before they load each Sesibee, two men
hold it still while a third saws off the tips of their horns and melts black,
plastic, water tubing onto it. This them from stabbing one another in the
containers and holding pens. N bent his wedding band holding onto the horns of
one of these Sesibee to keep it still.
The last day was slower than the first two. The only
new animal, we caught today, were zebras. They have to use special tall
containers, designed for giraffe’s, because the zebras jump so high they break
their necks (and die instantly) in the regular containers. Fortunately,
in this catch all of them survived.
The next day was a driving day with a grocery stop in
Rundu. This was my favourite place we visited. Loud, jubilant,
African beats pour out of tiny shops onto the busy, dust filled streets. I saw
six pregnant women walk past, swaying their swollen bodies, in a ten-minute
span. You seldom pass women who are not carrying a something on their heads or
have a baby tied around their backs or both. In the line up at the grocery
store, a woman breastfed her child while he sat on her hip. Right there
at the cash out till, she just reached into her shirt and pulled out her
breast. It was very difficult not stare—he was not a small baby. A real TIA
moment! Everyone waved to me as I took photos. This stop was a highlight for
me. It felt so authentic and untouched by tourism.
Sunday we crossed the border into Botswana. The
disease control included wiping your shoes on this nasty soggy blanket and “I
don’t take your fruit, you buy my souvenirs, okay?”
Botswana has massive herds of elephants because they
do not practice culling to control overpopulation like they do in South Africa.
The idea of culling is repugnant to me. You cannot just take a few elephants
from a herd to control the numbers because the rest will go berserk. You have
to kill the entire herd, which can be from ten to thirty elephants at a time.
They do not have any other natural predator to keep their numbers down. When
there are too many of them people get killed and destroy the plant life, which
prevents other animal populations from flourishing. There are no easy solutions
on this one.
We finished off the day by going on a game drive
through Chobe National Park and setting up camp. It’s beautiful here!
Chobe is a “desert oasis.” You can hardly drive fifteen minutes without
seeing amazing wildlife. (This is very uncommon on game drives. Normally
we usually were spending eight hours in the car and feeling lucky to see
anything other than antelope every few hours. Botswana is mostly very dry and
dusty so the Chobe/Zambezi River attract a lot of wildlife. We saw lions, and
hundreds of elephants all three days were there. Monkey's relentlessly raided
our campsite, despite the boys valiant efforts to keep them at bay by hurling
rocks at the nasty little thieves. It sounds mean, but we had no other defenses
against them, and they will bite.
We celebrated N’s birthday Monday June 20 with an
evening boat tour and buffet dinner. That night we woke up to they terrifying
sound of an elephant snacking on the trees surrounding our campsite. We were
sleeping in tents on the ground and had seen many times in our drives that even
trees do not get in elephant’s way. My brother-in-law screamed for us all to
get into the truck. We all piled in and in the headlights of the truck could
see our friend was only a few meters from the tents. We drove away and waiting
until he was gone to return to bed…not that I was going to sleep after that. N
concluded that it was an excellent end to his birthday.
Tuesday afternoon, we headed to Zimbabwe, to see
Victoria Falls. It is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, and
rightly so! It was breathtakingly beautiful! Everyone should go and
see Victoria Falls before they die.
Zimbabwe has "Tourist Police" to escort you
to the falls and keep hecklers at bay. They actually wear vests that say,
"Tourist Police" right on them, which did give the initial impression
that they were there to police not protecting tourists. Still, I was glad they
were there.
Zimbabwe's economy is in such a tragic state that
people on the street will sell you trillions of dollars in the expired
currency for a few US dollars. The country now uses US currency. I bought a
note that says it is worth 5 Billion Dollars. Zimbabwe also has both a Prime
Minister and a President our cab driver informed us. We found the idea of this
kind of amusing, but it has had quite devastating effects on the once fairly
prosperous nation.
The next day, my brother-in-law decided to cash in on
the bungee jumping that N and I gave him as an eighteenth birthday gift. He got
the Adrenaline package (zip line, swing and bungee off Vic Falls Bridge). N
joined him for the zip line. I thought I was going to vomit just
watching. It’s an 111m drop.
Then we headed into Zambia just across the border to
see Vic Falls from the other side. The falls flow over the board of both
countries and both claim their side is superior. We concluded that Zimbabwe
side was more to look at, and better photos but that Zambia side was more of an
experience. On the Zambian side, you experience the heat of the day, the
rain falling down and spray coming up at you all at once. When we were able to
see the falls through the mist, we were ankle deep in water.
Despite the fact that the passports were in Ziploc
bags they were soaked when we got out. I tried to dry them out by placing
strips of our precious rations of toilet paper between the pages. (I will never
take TP for granted again after this road trip!) I think it did help to salvage
them a bit, but it was embarrassing when we crossed the border again that night
back into Botswana. I was terrified that they would not let us back again.
Thursday June 23 we drove to Maun.
On Friday, we did a day trip into the Central Kalahari
Desert.
Saturday we set out on a three-day Mokoro Boat Trip
through the Okavango Delta. Mokoro boats are long flat bottom canoes
traditionally carved out of a single tree (although ours were fiber glass). The
Delta is breathtaking. It’s fairly shallow, still water. You can stand in most
places. It’s reedy and filled with flowering lily pads. I could just not
get enough of these fantastic water plants I’d never seen them like this,
hundreds of them floating on the calm water. We camped on a small island,
falling asleep at night to the croaking songs of the painted reed frogs.
So that takes us to today. Eight flights and
three days and we’ll be back home!
Montreal, DC, South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia,
Botswana…there’s not place like home.
