Time: 11:30 pm
Days abroad: 77
(Post #2 of 10 day vac trip)
We continue on our journey through southern Africa...
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Saturday came very early (again) and we got our first experience packing up the heavy canvas tents we used. It was not my favorite experience of the trip…for sure. We left the campground (Trail Blazers) at the wonderful hour of 7:30 am and set out for the Okavango Delta. It took us about 5 hours to get to the city of Maun, Botswana. The trip was uneventful except for one bathroom stop in the middle of the bush where I accidentally displayed my superhuman strength and broke a window in the truck…I was feeling a bit carsick but it was cold out so we had left the truck windows closed while driving. Well, we stopped to let people find a bush and I decided to get some fresh air, I slid the window and it shattered into one billion little safety glass pieces, all over the ground, all over me, all over the seat…woops. The theory is that it cracked while bumping over the harsh roads and me sliding it jostled it just enough…really it was because I am too strong for my own good.
Anyways, after the window broke, of course, it started raining. And raining. And raining. Making for a rough ride into Maun. We stopped in town to exchange our money (Botswanian currency is the Pula) and buy some supplies for the 2-day trip into the delta we were taking…we all had to buy water since we were about to embark on some actual bush camping (no toilets, no sinks, no buildings, no pool, no bar, and no showers). Then we continued out of Maun a little way to the Island Safari Resort where we were camping Saturday night. We had the option to upgrade to a hotel room but, once again, Sara and I opted to save the money and sleep in a tent, as did most of our fellow travelers. After lunch, we headed back into Maun to the Maun International Airport. Somewhat reminiscent of the Windhoek International airport, it was a tiny building (though, it had 2 floors—so I guess a little bigger than Windhoek) and 7 of us purchased a ticket for a 45 minute scenic flight over the Okavango Delta. We proceeded through security (a machine from the stone ages, I doubt it would’ve signaled that I had metal on me if I was wearing a suit of armor) and headed out to meet our pilot, Frank and get in our little Cessna plane:
It was the first time I had ever been in a plane so small and I had a blast! (Minus the last 10 minutes where I was feeling the effects of lunch…) Of course, they told me right before I boarded that Frank is a pilot in training, as are all scenic flight pilots, trying to build up his flight hours so he can get certified to fly real passenger planes…I guess that means I am not a real passenger?! Yikes. The view of the Delta from up there was INCREDIBLE. The Delta is enormous…obviously we only saw a tiny portion of it but it seemed to stretch on forever! I have about a zillion pictures of it…here is one of a watering hole and some of the expanse: 
We flew at about 450 meters off the ground so we could see a whole bunch of animals. We saw elephants and giraffes and buffalo (water buffalo) and zebra and impala and springbok and tons and tons of hippos (like these little guys):
(if you click on the picture it will get larger and you will actually be able to see the hippos...they are the 2 grey blobs one on the left-ish side, about a third of the way in from the edge and a third of the way down from the top and the other on the right side, closer to the bottom of the picture with little white birds on his back)
Aren’t they just ADORABLE?
After our flight we drove back out to the campsite. I wandered down to the bar with most of the people in our group…everyone wanted to use the wi-fi and have a drink. We hung out until dinner at 730…pasta bake and broccoli and a salad. Then, we had CAKE!! Because it was Martin’s 22nd birthday. Happy birthday Martin.
Then I set about the task of re-packing my bags…for the next 2 days we were going to be camping in the delta and we were travelling by mokoro which is a tiny little wooden canoe…we were limited to just our day packs so we had to pull what we needed out of our big bags and smash two days into a little backpack. The showers at island safari were surprisingly bug-free…and when the water spread out through the shower head it looked surprisingly clear (as opposed to when we put it in the dish tub and it was a murky grey-brown…apparently the taps come from the river, hence the buying of water in Maun); so I took a very long, Hollywood shower in anticipation of my next couple of days…We all went to bed early because we had a 530 am wake-up in order to pack everything into the delta.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
We got up verrrrrrrrrrrry early (530) in order to get camp packed into the speedboat we were taking up the river to the mokoro station. We all piled our gear and ourselves into a speedboat and headed off down the river. We hadn’t gone more than 100 yards when the driver man turned around…apparently we were too heavy for 1 boat and we needed to offload 6 people into a second boat. After that minor hiccup we were on our way. The mokoro station was about a 50 minute speed boat ride from Island Safari and we paused every time the driver saw a unique bird or animal he wanted to point out. There were a ton of fisher eagles along the river which are beautiful big birds…I thought of Kimmy every time we saw one, she loves eagles, haha.
When we got to the mokoro station it was madness! There were people and boats and gear everywhere! There was another group there from a Nomad adventure tour which was mainly people from my CIEE program so I was talking to some of the girls…we finally got it all sorted out. 2 people per mokoro plus their gear. Extra mokoros for the tents and food and kitchen gear. Sara and I’s mokoro driver was a nice 25 year old Tswana man named Khumo (though when he said it it sounded almost like Kumar). The mokoro ride was another 45 minutes to our campsite and Khumo was very quiet but I kept pestering him with questions about the bugs and the frogs and the delta and his life…I’m pretty sure he would’ve loved to flip the mokoro on top of me…or smack me with the pole he was using to drive the thing. But instead, he just answered me as best he knew…and he knew a lot. When they get hired to take tourists out into the delta they have to study and learn all of the animals and the bugs and the plants and the trees according to the English words, on top of everything they already know from their parents and people in their village—the Tswana people have been living in he delta forever...so they have all kinds of knowledge. I asked him what he would do in the instance of a hippo charge and he said “if a hippo charges the mokoro I will jump out and run away and leave you guys here” hahaha, a sense of humor out of him, at last! Although his joke did end with me as hippo fodder—clearly our relationship was off to a bit of a rocky start…
We finally got to camp at about 11am. The mokoro drivers unloaded the boats and we set about putting camp up. We had a little intro speech—don’t go off ANYWHERE by yourself (or in a group without a mokoro driver), don’t shine flashlights into hippos eyes, basic things like that…then we were given the afternoon to lie about in the sun. We dragged our mattresses out and sat in the shade and just relaxed. At about 3:30 a huge thunderstorm came up. It was absolutely beautiful:
It reminded me of the thunderstorms in Rocky Mountain National Park, where the lightning is all the way around you. We watched the storm build from our campsite and when the rain started pouring we all retreated to our tents for a little nap. At 5 that evening it had cooled off enough for our introductory game walk. We were introduced to the 3 game walk guides: Morotsi, Khumo, and Justice. Then we split into 3 groups of 5 and headed out. I was in Morotsi’s group (I’m sure Khumo was relieved) with Bella, Martin, Sara, and Jennah. We started the walk with basic game walk etiquette—walk in single file; if there is a hole in the path, say “hole” for the person behind you; if you are charged by an animal, follow instructions specific to that animal (elephants = run downwind in a zig-zag pattern, they have excellent noses and they can out run you but they don’t zig-zag well; lions = don’t run, stare them down *right*; and my personal favorite, buffalo = run up a tree) after our briefing, we set out on our walk. We could hear hippos as soon as we started our walk, they make a hilariously cute grunting noise; so, Morotsi took us on a long loop around to a pool he called the lagoon. There were about 7 hippos hanging out in the pool including a little baby hippo! So cute. We watched them for a while then headed back to camp for dinner. On the way back, Morotsi talked about all the different birds we could hear: the Cape Turtle Dove tweets all the time and, according to Morotsi, he says “Bot-swa-na, Bot-swa-na, work har-der, work har-der”; we saw a couple of parrots; several kinds of storks; and big white ducks. Morotsi also pointed out elephant tracks, anteater holes, and “snake berries” which are little yellow berries that grow close to the ground (they look like yellow cherry tomatoes) that you are supposed to boil and drink when you get bitten by a snake—good to know since there are many snakes in the Okavango Delta.
We had chicken, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, and corn all cooked over the campfire for dinner—delicious. Though I had a little bit of an issue regarding giant bugs flying at me while I was eating. There are 3 types of praying mantis that live in the delta. One of them FLIES. And from what I could tell in the dark panic flailing that went on all of dinner, they can grow to be about 2 or 3 inches long. SICK. The stars that we could see in the delta were incredible…for the first time in my life I actually SAW Orion, and understood how the constellation worked. Wow. And the Southern Cross…of course, being in the Southern Hemisphere helped me out on that one I think…
The Tswana guides kept the fire going all night and I fell asleep listening to a couple of the guys speaking Tswana around the fire. Tswana is a beautiful language, much more flowy than either Zulu or Xhosa which are the 2 tribal languages I hear the most in Cape Town. I quite enjoyed listening to the Tswana. Though, for all I knew they were making fun of the dumb American tourist girl who asked so many questions…but if they were making fun of me, at least it was nice to listen to…
Also, a fun fact I learned about Botswana. “Bo” in Tswana refers to language so the country is effectively named after their language. How cool is that?
Well, that is all for tonight…I am going to try to keep up with this two days per night thing I have going…that way the picture upload doesn’t take years and I don’t get carpal tunnel from all the typing…if you cant tell, I have a LOT to say about my trip…though the 3 days we were in the Okavango were I think my favorite days…but I did really enjoy Zambia as well…there were good points during every day…you’ll see.
I hope you aren’t all sadly disappointed so far…I promise, pictures of animals are coming!
Love
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