Cape Town

Cape Town, the big city. It was to function as a stepping stone to getting back to life in London again, and it certainly had a "ryssat anttilassa" effect on us (sorry not appropriate to translate word-by-word into english, but let's just say we got a bit excited in a supermarket on our first night in CT... "salad! cheese! rye crackers!")

We booked into Ashanti and reserved a triple room, so it was quite luxurious. (Ashanti is a GREAT hostel by the way, definitely recommended!! Great for the slightly older traveller, meaning they have a separate guesthouse with private rooms that are huge, very clean, lovely decor and very quiet.)

It's the winter now in Southern Africa, and we’d heard lots of horror stories about the winter weather in Cape Town. Apparently it rains pretty much all the time and it can get really miserable. However the luck was for once on our side and our first morning here started with beautiful sunshine and a clear sky. Perfect day to visit the Table Mountain! We got a cab to the cable car and while Minna and Kaisa joined the queue I went to enquire about a map at the info centre. They didn’t have any maps, but the girl working there somehow managed to convince me that it would be a much better idea to walk up rather than take the cable car: “Only about one and half hours walk”. So up we walked. Except for it wasn’t a one and a half hours walk, but almost a three-hour hard-core climb, at times on all fours. We practically speaking died several times (apart from our marathon-runner Kaisa), it was so bad. The only thing that kept us going was the thought of re-visiting the info centre once down, so we could strangle the girl working there. We were so not prepared for the hike and had hardly any water with us. I drank from a stream coming down the hill hoping that it wasn’t the drain from the restaurant at the top, it got so desperate. But believe it or not, we made it to the top, where we corked a bottle of bubbly Kaisa had kindly carried in her backpack all the way there. Yes, it tasted great! (Afterwards we found a long list of equipment in our guide books recommended for the Table Mountain hike, including torches and whistles. We only had a bottle of bubbly and three plastic wine glasses…)

The lovely weather held up for the rest of the week and we were able to hire a car and drive down to the Cape of Good Hope and the Cape Point. Driving in South Africa was one thing I’d sworn definitely not to do (too much traffic, not very safe, etc) but renting a car was too cheap to resist, plus the public transport isn’t great. It was fine apart from finding our way out of Cape Town took a very long time. The road we wanted to take was closed and the alternative scenic route simply didn’t exist outside the map but at least we got a very thorough sightseeing tour of the suburbs. We spent the night in Simon’s Town (we never found out who was this Simon, even though we kept asking and asking) which is a cute little coastal town about an hour’s drive south of CT. Penguins also like Simon’s town so much that they live there in their hundreds, so we got to see lots of them. They’re the small jackass ones, really really cute! I managed to kidnap one as it fitted perfectly in my back-pack (ok I didn’t but I really wanted to).

The following day we had the best breakfast in a little patisserie called the Sweetest Thing, please make note of this if you ever end up in Simon’s Town! Mmmmm…. After some more penguin-spotting we drove up the road to Muizenberg where I wasn’t planning to surf at all, no, I just wanted to quickly have a look at the waves. But they were too perfect to give a miss so soon I found myself in the water giving Kaisa her first ever surfing lesson. I hope she caught the bug!

Back in CT that night, we parked our car outside the hostel and headed out for some shopping. The shopping centre (Victoria Wharf) was big and we had a few more ‘ryssat Anttilassa” moments, it was SOOO nice to shop & being able to wear new clothes rather than choose from the five smelly t-shirts I’d been wearing since March. Another beautiful dinner with some beautiful wine and we went to bed knackered, ready to get up early for a Wine Tour in the following morning. As we were waiting to be picked up we had a lovely surprise: During the night a bus had smashed into our rental car and the whole of the driver’s side was damaged and the mirror broken off. Always a nice thing to having to deal with…. But there wasn’t much we could do about it at that moment as the wine was waiting for us.

An all-day wine tour with a guide and a driver was certainly a memorable experience! We visited four different vineyards and tasted 27 different wines, quite generous portions as well. The only problem was that after the fifth one they all just tasted wonderful… Later on that night we met up with some others from the wine tour in Mama Africa (restaurant), and tried a couple of bars in Long Street. We finished off the night by opening one of the bottles of bubbly we’d bought from the vineyard at the hostel porch and reminiscing about the past few weeks. For it was our last night in Africa.

Sunday started off not so great: it was pissing down with rain, we had to pack, visit a police station and sort out the smashed rental car. Very depressing. After some brunch in Lola’s café Minna and Kaisa had to leave to the airport, I still had a couple of hours to kill, so I spent the remaining time wisely by finding the perfect wooden hippo.

I’ve got ten minutes until a taxi is due to pick me up. Don’t want to go, no no no. Maybe the flight will be cancelled due to bad weather? Maybe there will be a high-jack and the plane will be re-directed to Mozambique? Fingers crossed.

The rest of Namibia

We found out that there was an overnight train from Swakopmund to Windhoek and it sounded like a fun way to travel. The only problem was that no-one seemed to know when the train would come, but apparently there definitely was one. (On hindsight, at this point we should have questioned why no locals ever used that train...) The ticket office at the railway station was closed all day Sunday, but the security guard assured us that if we waited long enough, the train would come.

Before that we wanted to say goodbye to our new friends, and got a customised tour around the slums. As we were dropped off at the train station, our guide wanted to have a serious talk with us. Apparently we're way too friendly and trusting, and that we should not under any circumstances befriend any more strangers especially in Windhoek as we wouldn't last very long.

Then we waited for the train. And waited. And waited. At about nine o'clock (after more than two hours' wait) we saw something moving towards us very slowly. It looked like a train, but it moved at a pace of a donkey cart. But in we hopped, and ten and a half hours later we reached Windhoek (a bus takes three hours for the same journey). It wasn't one of the greatest train journeys I've ever been on to be honest, and we didn't feel exactly refreshed when we got to our hostel in Windhoek in the morning.

Windhoek was cold, chaotic and stressful, so we wanted to get out as quickly as possible. We spent the whole day planning our escape, and managed to organise a get-away vehicle for the following day: a one-way car hire. By the following afternoon we were on our way to the desert with our camping equipment (=tent and plastic wine glasses) and some newly bought blankets, socks and fleece pyjamas so we wouldn't freeze to death in the desert.

After the stunning three-hour drive over the mountains we got to a guest farm in Solitaire, which was yes you guessed it, in the middle of nowhere. We pitched our tent, made friends with the farm's pet springbok and prepared a gourmet meal on the fire (tinned rice and vegetables). The night was very windy, but to our amazement the tent didn't blow away. In the morning the pet springbok turned out to be less friendly than in the previous evening and kept attacking us. I had to get help in the end from the farm owners while Kaisa and Minna were hiding in the toilet.

That day we saw the red dunes of Sossusvlei and climbed a few of them. Dunes are cool, but after a while they all look like big piles of sand (which they, let's face it, are) so we didn't stay too long.

Our next destination was Fish River Canyon (approximately a 8-hour drive away - Namibia is a big country!), which is the second biggest canyon in the world after Grand Canyon (I bet you'd never even heard of it before). It was rather big, and very canyon-like. We'd seriously considered doing the five-day, 85-km hike through the canoyn, but in the end chose the 45-minute, 5-km hike instead. It was probably a very wise decision.

After three nights of camping and 1500km later we made it to Luderitz, a small and pretty seaside town near where we had to return the car. On the way we stopped to check out the wild horses of the Namib desert. They only have one waterhole from where to drink, so if you park the car next to it, you’re guaranteed to see some. We saw lots, quite an amazing sight!

We stayed for two nights in the Luderitz backpackers – our last two nights in Namibia.
Luderitz is located next to a top-security diamond mining area, which pretty much consists of the whole southwest corner of Namibia. Close to Luderitz there is a ghost town called Kolmanskop, which was the Namibian diamond centre until the 50s. It’s a strangely beautiful place, looks like a film set with all the empty buildings now taken over by sand dunes, but the "ghost town" aspect was slightly lost in the herds of tourists around.

On Sunday we had to say goodbye to our little VW Golf and hop on Anna’s minibus towards Keetmanshoop, where we were going to catch Intercape bus to Cape Town. It was a slightly different minibus experience to the previous one, where gangsta rap was played on full volume and the driver offered us sips of his beer. This time we hadn’t even left Luderitz, when Anna pulled the bus to the side of the road, and we all had to pray together for a safe journey. In Afrikaas. Sure enough, God delivered us safely to our destination, where we had to wait for another seven hours for the Intercape in a Wimpy.

How does one pass seven hours in a Wimpy, you may wonder. In case anyone else ever finds themselves in a similar situation, I shall share my tips with you. There’s coffee. There’s painting toenails green. Plucking eyebrows. Filing nails. Eating a burger. Painting fingernails green. There’s more coffee. Reading a book. Watching South African teenagers on school trip praying together with Wimpy’s kitchen staff. Calling parents. Finally, once everything else is done, try arranging all your coins from your purse in the order of the year they were made. I was fascinated to find clear patterns in coin production: 1993 was a great year for printing 10 cents and 2002 for 50 cents.

At about midnight, just when I was about to be sent off with the men in white jackets, Intercape came to the rescue and whisked us off to Cape Town. Well, it didn’t happen quite so quickly: The journey took about 16 hours. They have the best bus seats ever, but there’s a price to pay: you’re forced to watch – how could I put it nicely – Christian-themed dramas with a lot of praying onboard.

So there we were, all of a sudden in the big city. Almost three weeks in Namibia had flown by. Wide-eyed, we got off the bus and hopped on a taxi.

The girls look for 'real Africa'

Catching a local bus is certainly an experience in Namibia. Not because there's anything wrong with them as such - they are actually quite clean and comfortable, but there's just a little bit too much waiting involved. There's no timetable to start with, so you just have to go and wait by the 'bus station' (there isn't an official one of course, so finding the right spot in the first place involves a lot of asking around). Once the bus gets there (and of course there are no signs to indicate where the buses are heading to), the price is fully negotiable and there's an added bonus that the bus doesn't leave until it's full. The driver also functions as a wannabe DJ (they certainly seem to be able to afford very powerful speakers), and the ticket inspector made sure we got into the mood by offering us a drink from his beer. If any passengers wanted to stop at a post office for example on the way, it was no problem, because we were not in a hurry.

We got to Walvis Bay (a quiet and relatively non-touristy town on the coast) at eight at night, after the bus driver had dropped us to our B&B (well almost, they couldn't quite find it, but it was close). We were greeted by a very friendly lady who we christened Helga. It was hard to guess her age, but it was probably something between 50 and 80 (could be something to do with the fact that she smoked like a chimney). She instatly took us under her wing, and from then on we didn't only have a nice private room to stay in, but also a personal organiser, driver, and a cook. We'd only need to mention something we're planning to do, and off she went to organise it for us. Before we had time to unpack, she'd already booked us for a sandboarding trip for the following morning.

And sandboarding we went. Sandboarding is exactly what it says on the package: like snowboarding but instead of a ski slope you come down a dune, using a snowboard. It was only the three of us and our instructor/ski lift Wayne, who taught us the basics and then drove us up the dunes with his quadbike. I've got some interesting previous experiences of snowboarding when I could't move for several days afterwards, so I was a little bit nervous. However, I can wholeheartedly recommend sandboarding as it's not only much easier than snowboarding but it also hurts much less to fall. I think we all got the bug now, and from now on will spend all our holidays in places like Sahara.

In the evening we went to a fantastic seafood restaurant called The Raft. I'd been fantasising about seafood and fish for a long time (I haven't been by the sea since... beginning of March maybe?) and it was worth the wait. I had mussels in a creamy cheese and leek sauce for a starter, and a fish called king clip for my main. Yummy!

The next morning we woke up for the devastating news about the departure of Michael Jackson, and shed a few tears until it was time to leave for our boat cruise. The idea was to go to see some whales and dolphins, but the package included food and drink (which we kept moaning about - we were obviously funding the Germans on the same boat who didn't hesitate to make most of the all inclusive beer until the captain came round with some coffee liquer. After some seal-hugging (a seal hopped onboard and I'm not making this up but we all got to have a go at hugging it - it was really cute!) and dolphin spotting (no whales around that days apart from the white-skinned German type) it was time for a picnic. I'm now an oyster-convert, they were delicious, especially when flushed down with a glass, two, or three of sparkling wine.

Back onshore, Helga met us with our bags and the transport service she'd organised for us to take us our next destination: Swakopmund, another sea-side resort just half an hour away up the road. We were slightly tipsy by then, and very grateful for our personal organiser so we didn't have to do much thinking by ourselves.

"More German than Germany" - that's how LP describes Swakopmund. Our authentic African holiday was feeling less and less authentic by the minute, so we made a pledge to get to know some locals and discover the real Swakopmund beyond the German Disneyland. After the booze cruise in the morning and another bottle of bubbly enjoyed on the beach, it was surprisingly easy. We certainly got to see the other side of Swakop (including a night club which had probably never been visited by white people before) and made some friends for life.

The following day we mainly rested.

Livingstone - Namibia all night long (and Eeva goes safari)

I didn't really know what to expect from the Vic falls. I got dropped off at the entrance (free minibus from the hostel) and teamed up with Heather from Canada, paid up the $10 park fee and in we went. You can hear the falls from quite far away, and the air starts getting more and more moist as you approach them. Then all of the sudden you can see them right in front of you: magnificent, thundering, too big to see where they start and where they end. Just lots of water, lots of spray, so high, so close - one slip and you're gone, they don't believe in safety fences around here! You get completely soaked as you cross the footbridge, but luckily I was prepared and had a raincoat with me. We watched people doing bungee jumps from the bridge that separates Zambia from Zimbabwe, I decided not to go for it (note: been there, done that already... not my cup of tea). After a few hours of wandering around we left and did some souvenir shopping in the markets - or trading more like. My made-in-china umbrella bought in Botswana for pennies turned out to be a very desirable item and I swapped it for a lovely ebony hippo carving, my hairband paid for a cool necklace, and they also wanted my flipflops and t-shirt but even though I was tempted, I decided I had to draw the line there.

Last night in Jolly boys, we went out for a great Indian meal and when we got back I spotted a table tennis table in the corner. I'm a closet table tennis fanatic so I spent the rest of the night playing like there was no tomorrow.

I left Livingstone and Zambia behind on Wednesday. On the bus to Namibia I met Kaisa and Minna from Finland and after 13-hours, several border and passport checks, stops and packets of crisps later we got off in Tsumeb, Namibia. We had to double check we hadn't actually arrived in the middle of Germany - it's surprisingly hard to tell! This place is as far from Africa as Finland is from North Korea. After realising that Tsumeb was a place we couldn't get out of fast enough, we decided to organise our own safari to the Etosha national park. It took us pretty much the whole of Thursday to get sorted, but by the end of the day, we had all the gear: sleeping mats, tents, a mountain of tinned food and of course our very own safari vehicle: a silver Hyundai Atos, about the size of a small beetle.

On Friday morning we hit the road. The 100km journey took us about half an hour, thanks to the amazing, empty roads they have here. I don't think we came across any other cars on the way there! The next three days we spent driving around the huge national park and camped on each of the campsites there. Every morning we'd get up, have a cheese and tomato toastie heated on the campfire, moved on to the restaurant to have a cup of coffee (finally, travel companions who understand the importance of a good cup of coffee!) and plan our route for the day.
The rest of the day went smoothly driving around the dusty roads from one waterhole to another, spotting various animals. There are so many zebras in Etosha that it got to the stage where every time we saw some we would cry: Not another zebra!! My biggest wish to start with was to see a rhino, and my wish came true on the first day already. We parked by a waterhole and were just about to leave when there we saw something coming towards us. We stopped the car and saw the rhino, who obviously had taken a liking to our car. To him it must have seemed like a lovely, shiny female. We were told to move by the people in a safari car next to us to avoid any closer encounters with the rhino, which we duly did – we didn't want to risk having to explain the strange damage at the back of our car.

Some of the highlights of our safaris included taking a pee next to a sleeping lion (“But it's obviously sleeping! It's not going to mind if we get out of the car...”), getting excited about spotting birds (even I had an enthusiastic birdspotter inside me waiting to be released) and breaking the national park rules one after the other (such as feeding animals: surely birds and gerbils don't count?).

We got back to Tsumeb on Monday afternoon, ready to leave the “one of the loveliest towns in Namibia” (accoriding to LP). Again we couldn't wait to get out fast enough. Little did we know that destiny had other plans for us: Kaisa caught a stomach bug which meat that we had to spend another day in town. While she stayed in the hostel hugging the toilet for the course of Tuesday, me and Minna took in the sights of Tsumeb. The local museum had a very interesting collection of stamps.

Finally on Wednesday morning Kaisa managed to keep her breakfast in, so we packed our bags and run out. The plan is to jump on a local bus and head to the coast. Let's see where we end up.

the Zambian encounter

Enjoyed the cruise and my last night in Bots very much. Saw lots of elephants - one even right in the campside where I was staying! There are so many elephants in Kasane, and you see them everywhere, unlike in the delta. After the cruise I had a drink at the lodge bar, met some lovely Motswanas and made a few new best friends. It was a great finish off for my three months in the country.

In the morning I packed up and donated my huge mattress to a cleaning lady who seemed delighted - really - then headed to the road. I jumped in a taxi who took me to the border ferry and cried a little because I didn't really want to go. The plan was to wait on the Botswana side until I'd secured a lift to Livingstone as I'd heard a few warnings about the Zambian side - apparently it was a place where you didn't really want to hang out for too long if it could be avoided. I waited for about an half an hour, got hassled a bit but nothing too bad, then hopped on the ferry as I spotted a white guy who I suspected to be a tourist on his way to Livingstone. That was Attie, and he turned out to be one of the most amazing people I've ever met. He wasn't a tourist, he'd been born in Malawi as son of a missionary and dedicated his life to humanitarian aid. He was living in Zambia where he delivered medicine to the local clinic, built orphanages and generally did good all around. As we got to the other side (some waiting around as the bus in front of us got stuck and couldn't get off the ferry for about an hour...) he had to wait for the paperwork to clear for the medicines in the trucks, so I waited as well and made friends with the touts trying to sell me souvenirs. As soon as we established the fact that I wasn't going to buy any, they turned out to be really friendly and lovely people. Attie also introduced me to Cecilia, a local woman who'd taken in 48 orphans. I nearly cried again, it was genuinely touching to meet someone like her, she had nothing herself but she still looked after all these children. After an hour, or maybe two it turned out that the paperwork was going to take at least another few hours, so Attie decided to take me to Livingstone anyway and then come back himself - 150km round-trip. On top of this he refused to take any for the lift AND bought me a coffee once we got to Livingstone. So by the time I got to my hostel I was feeling quite emotional and just amazed by the goodness of these people. Makes you believe in humanity again.

Jolly Boys is the name of the hostel where I headed, quickly settled in, and met some great people straight away. I even had dinner cooked for me (so yesterday was all take, take, take...)! The dorms were full so out came my little tent again and I managed to borrow a mattress from someone else. I had a quick glance at the activities book and as soon as I saw an offer for a 'lion encounter + elephant back safari' I was sold and signed up. I was too excited to sleep properly and was up at 5.45am just thinking about the day ahead.

Couple of hours later, I was walking with lions. The lion encounter is a lion rehabilitation program, where they breed lions to release the cubs into the wild (www.lionencounter.org) I got to pet them too, and had the biggest grin ever on my face on the pictures. It was just unbelievable! Loved it. I had a few hours to kill in between the lions and the elephants I just chilled out by the pool at Jolly Boys.

Then it was time for the elephants. After living amongst them for three months, seeing hundreds of them and learning so much about them, I still hadn't actually ever touched an elephant - well you wouldn't mess with the wild ones. These eles were rescued as babies so they were tame and it was a different story. We went for a ride for an hour around the national park, then spent about half an hour feeding and petting them. There were two babies too - the cutest things ever!

I'm still trying to take in the experiences of the last few days so you have to excuse me the flat and boring descriptions. Sometimes words fail me like now - I don't know of any words that would make justice to the amazing time I've had so far in Zambia. But it's been good. Great. Wonderful. Nah, I just can't explain it. But I can't stop smiling, that's now happy I am right now. I could say that life can't get much better than this, but I'm going to see the Victoria Falls tomorrow so I suspect that life is just about to get even better.

New horizons

On Monday morning we left. It was lovely and sunny, as it always is here in Bostawana this time of the year. A few hours later, after we’d crossed the river already, it started to rain, and it didn’t stop raining for there days. It never rains in here in June - this is the middle of the dry season. We got to Maun just after it got dark in the pouring rain, went out for a pizza and had an early night. The following morning after we’d done some running around we headed towards Sowa town in the eastern Botswana, where Anna and Graham have their house. It was still pissing with rain. We never made it to Sowa, but had to seek refuge on the way as the rain and darkness got too much. We found a cozy safari lodge near Nata where we stayed the night, and continued our journey in the morning. In Sowa I spent the whole day trying to cash my traveler’s cheques. In the evening we had dinner and a small birthday celebration, for it was my birthday the following day and also our last night together.

On Thursday morning we went to see the Sowa salt pans, a home for thousands and thousands of flamingoes and also the place where Graham did his PhD – on flamingoes, of course. A miracle happened: the sun came out. The flamingoes were out too, it felt like the seaside and smelled like the seaside, in the middle of a desert. Magical place.

It was time for me to go and say goodbye to Anna and Graham, who were heading in the other direction. I was due to jump on a bus to Kasane, but Graham managed to find me a lift with some guy he knew. I got to Kasane, got dropped off at Thebe camp site feeling extremely tired and not in the best of spirits. The place was horrible, but it was the only place I could stay for an affordable price as I didn’t have my own camping equipment (I’d tried to buy some in Maun but couldn’t find anything and Thebe had promised to hire a tent for me). The campsite had flooded recently, so my tent was placed in a lovely spot between the main road and the temporary bar, with the view of the office. The whole place just felt hostile, nothing like the other lodges and campsites I’d been to so far. Miserable, I went to bed at 6.30pm, trying to forget it was my birthday. I read Anna Karenina for a couple of hours (great travel book, it just lasts and lasts…), then tried to go to sleep, but it was around then that the party started going in the nearby bar. They closed just before midnight, when I finally managed to fall asleep.

Wake-up was at 5.20am, as I’d decided to do an early morning game drive that was organized by the campsite. It was excellent – we got to Chobe National Park just as the sun was rising and most of the animals were active. In the space of three hours I saw lions (very close – one crossed the road just in front of the car, and we also witnessed lions mating in the grass…), elephants (my first time seeing a baby elephant in the daylight), giraffes, buffaloes, warthogs, impala to name a few. After the game drive I headed to Kasane town and when I got back to the campsite in the afternoon I spoke to the reception staff about moving my tent somewhere else where I could actually get some sleep and perhaps even a nice view. They said no. I had a moment of clarity – I wasn’t going to stay in this shithole for another night especially as it was my last days in Botswana, so I packed my bags and walked off, even though I’d already paid for two nights there. I jumped on a taxi, and asked him to drop me off in town. I’d seen a small tent for sale in one of the shops earlier that day, so I bought that and a mattress (no camping mattresses around, so I had to buy a big one...), and with my big rucksack, small rucksack, handbag, tent, and a full-size mattress walked into the most beautiful safari lodge in town (Chobe Safari Lodge) and asked to camp there. They were friendly, the place was lovely, I felt so much happier!
I was looking for a spot for my tent by the river when I spotted an Intrepid Travel bus. That’s the company I nearly booked a tour with to travel from Livingstone to Cape Town, until I decided to do it on my own. The guide was setting up the camp as his group were out on a boat cruise and we started chatting. He invited me to camp with them and also to join them for a dinner, which I gladly accepted. It was a nice evening, and I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that I’d made the right choice to leave Thebe.

They were off to Livingstone this morning and offered me a free ride, which I was very tempted to take, but then decided to stay another night here in Kasane and just relax. I also wanted to do the boat cruise on the Chobe river. So that’s my plan for today – they have a swimming pool at the lodge so after I’m finished here at the Internet café I shall park myself next to the pool, and maybe try getting some colour on my pitifully white legs (which have remained untanned due to me wearing long trousers most of time, while my arms and face are an impressive golden brown colour) while reading a bit more of my book. The cruise is later on in the afternoon, and tomorrow morning I’ll say goodbye to Botswana and try to get across the border.

The turmoil over the last few days was making me quite stressed out: I was feeling sad about leaving the camp, anxious about the accommodation in Kasane etc so I didn’t even feel exited about the impending journey ahead of me. However, I’m now full of optimism, excitement and curiosity, ready to embrace the adventure waiting for me. It was good to spend the night with the Intrepid group and notice that I’d made the right choice of going solo rather than joining a tour – I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed the strict schedule they were bound to. I can finally fully relate to the words I read a while ago and scribbled down in my notebook:

There is nothing more beautiful than a moment before a voyage, the moment when tomorrow’s horizon comes to visit us, to announce its promises. (Milan Kundera)

Snapshots of my last weeks in the camp

THE FLIGHT

I did a flight over the delta. Anna booked a pilot to come up over one weekend so she could check out where the elephants were hanging out during the day. It was a great mystery to us, as elephant sightings during the day were extremely rare, yet the roads were covered in footprints every morning. Elephants can walk tens of kilometers every day, so we were curious to see how far they were coming from. Hal the pilot flew over from Maun with his wife in a little two-seater plane, and after Anna had done all her flying I got to have a go. They had discovered an elephant paradise deep into the bush, completely inaccessible by road, where hundreds and hundred of elephants gathered around the waterholes and mophane forests. My flight lasted almost half an hour, but it felt like five minutes. It was quite amazing – just the experience of being in a tiny plane alone, not to mention seeing all the elephant from the air.

SCHOOL TALKS

We did another two school talks. The first one was in Gudigwa, a remote Bushman village, and the other one in Seronga, the “capital” of the panhandle area. I was keen to film one of the talks, and after being refused permission last time despite being all organized and applying in writing beforehand, I tried a different tactic this time, the opportunistic approach. When we turned up in Gudigwa Primary School, I just asked the teacher in charge and it was ‘no problem’. Much better! In Seronga I had my own group again to do the activities with, and this time I did a more convincing job of acting as the elephant expert.

THE TAPAS

One Sunday I was in a mood for some serious cooking, so I decided to cook tapas using whatever ingredients we had. Our supplies were running low as Graham had tried to go to the supermarket earlier that week, but wasn’t able to cross the river as the ferry was broken (250km round trip just to find out that the ferry is broken…). This was my tapas menu – put together from tinned stuff & leftovers mainly…

- Spanish omelette with tomato, roasted pepper & caramelized onion sauce
- Feta cheese wrapped in chargrilled courgettes drizzled with olive oil
- Garlic mushrooms in herb butter
- Butter beans in tomato sauce

THE GUNOTSOGA CHOIR

I wanted to record some local music to include in my film, so with the help of Nature I got together a few local girls to sing for me in exchange for cash. I set up a recording studio in our camp, but no singers turned up at the time agreed. I blamed the agent (Nature), who’d set up the session to clash with church service. So a few days later, I set up a mobile recording studio in the village, gathered everyone up and off we went. The choir consisted of three women and Nature (who insisted on joining them) and it was actually quite nice. I asked them to sing traditional songs from Botswana, and the second song they did sounded particularly nice, both me and Anna agreed. Afterwards, we asked what that song was about. “It’s about syphilis, AIDS and gonorrhea”, Nature helpfully translated. Great. I might have to think twice about using that one.

THIRTY BULLS

This is the time when the elephants have started to come in large numbers. The waterholes in the bush have started to dry up so they’ll have to utilize the river more and more. We were counting footprints one morning on the road to Gudigwa, and the relatively short stretch had already taken us hours, there were so many footprints everywhere. All of a sudden we saw elephants in front of us crossing the road. They kept coming, and we counted thirty bulls altogether. Anna said she’s never seen such a big bachelor herd together. We drove up to where they’d crossed, and saw them bathing on a puddle of floodwater just by the road. In silence we watched them bathing for about ten minutes, until I spoke just a bit too loud and the herd fled in a flash. It’s quite amazing how shy the elephants are in this area – as if a group of thirty bulls had anything to fear!

THESE BOOTS WERE MADE FOR WALKING

I’ve lost a few things in the past three months: a pair of underpants, a belt, a Swiss army knife and now my boots as well. The first three items I suspect I’ve dropped behind when we’ve been camping off-site, but my boots were a subject of a cold-blooded criminal act. It was the last week in the camp, I’d left them on the back of the car which Graham took to Shakawe (when he finally managed to do the supermarket run). On his way back he gave lifts to people, as we always do here, and as a thank you for a free lift someone walked off with my boots (and didn’t even leave his old shoes for me in exchange!). Shame really, but luckily we only had a few days left in the camp at that point so I didn’t desperately need them anymore. It was more the principle than anything else – Anna and Graham ARE the public transport for this area, as the actual bus (unreliable but still the only way for people to get around) broke down a few months ago. They’d never charge people and always pick up passengers on the way, but might think about it twice now. 99% of the people here are completely honest, but you just need the one to ruin it for everyone else. So to make a point, we reported the incident to the local police, after having Nature on the case first to track down the names of the people Graham gave lifts to - No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency-style (I’d lend him the book previously and I think he’s getting quite into the detective work now, Anna had better watch out so she won’t lose her translator). It remains to be seen whether this crime will be solved.

JOHN THE HEALER

Not really related just for the last few weeks in the camp, but I’ve been meaning to write about John our security guard for a long time. I guess the boots incident reminded me again – for I could’ve actually asked John to tell me who it was that took them, if we hadn’t already got the names of the suspects from Nature. You see, John knows these things. He’s not just a traditional healer, but also a clairvoyant, and a famous and an expensive one. Being our security guard is just one of his jobs, he also runs a hospital and a clairvoyance service from our camp (quite understandable, as he’s got not only one but two wives, who go off on furniture shopping sprees in Shakawe and leave poor John to pay off the bills). He has people coming all the way from Namibia to see him, as he is reputed to be one of the best. For the last two months he’s had a few long-term patients living in his camp, one of whom is being healed for ‘madness’, we learned one day. So our camp population has grown slowly from just four of us to about ten at its best.

GOODBYE TSA HA

Sunday was the last day in camp. Not just for me, but also Anna and Graham were leaving for two months, so we had to pack up most of the things. All finished in the afternoon, I took a chair and sat down at the quiet end of the camp by the water, determined to memorise the smell, the sounds, the view. I don’t know of a more beautiful place on this planet than Tsa Ha as it is now, completely unspoiled. It will all be different soon, as they’ve already started building a lodge across the water in Ndovu. I was very lucky to live there for three months, and as I’m writing this now I get tears in my eyes as I miss it so much already.

I made two lists.

Things I will NOT miss from the delta (to be read when I’m feeling particularly nostalgic and desperate to go back): The insect bites. The ants. Smoke from the fire. Not having a computer to write on. Having to remember taking the malaria pills every night. Waking up in the middle of the night and needing to go to the toilet. The cows raiding the camp and pooing everywhere. Cold mornings.

Things I WILL miss from the delta (to be read when someone asks me what I liked best about living there): The sound of the frogs at nighttime. The birds in the morning. The grunts of the hippoes in the afternoon. The distant growls and trumpeting of the elephants as they’re crossing the water and talking to each other. The view from the shower. Sundowners on the lagoon. The water lilies. Cooking on fire. Having the sun shining - every morning. Falling asleep within seconds every night without a fail. Having someone to do my laundry! Sliding through the reeds in a mokoro. The boat journey across the lagoon in the morning. The sound of the hippoes munching the grass. The moments when everything stands still, when it’s completely quiet.

Frustrations

I've been working on my patience for three months now and I thought I was doing quite well on that department. However today I was at the bank for three hours waiting to have a couple of travellers cheques processed, and nearly lost my will to live. They were still at it when the bank closed at 3.30pm, and I had a lock-in there for 45 mins after hours. Note to self: Forget about traveller's cheques when travelling in Botswana. Life's too short for that.

So we're having a monsoon in the middle of the dry season and thing's are getting rather miserable here. It hasn't stopped raining for two days and it's wet wet wet. I'm starting my solo travel adventure tomorrow and the plan is camp in Kasane for a few nights, which might not be that much fun if the rain doesn't stop soon.

I'm not in great spirits at the moment. I missed valuable time online because of all teh time I wasted at the stupid bank, so I'm not able to update this blog properly. I have so much to say, and I can't do it right now.

Full moon this weekend

I've been very quiet recently - but only because of the usual difficulties in getting to a computer & internet. My time in the bush is nearly over - we'll be heading to Maun on Monday and after that I shall start making my way out towards the Victoria falls in Zambia.

Before that, I'm planning to make the most of the beautiful Okavango which I shall be missing very much. Tonight we're camping on our usual "away from home" camping spot, an old field overlooking a lagoon. It's oh so quiet here.

Lots of love from Botswana, I'm hoping to update this blog as soon as I can (should be next week).

And by the way, I'm coming back on the 13th of July.

xxx

My article!

http://www.kepa.fi/uutiset/7101

English translation:

Pest Control in Botswana

A few days ago an elephant was shot in our village. Because the elephant in question was caught in a field raiding crops, it was a perfectly legal way of removing a problem animal. However the elephant didn’t die straight away but managed to run away, badly injured. She had two calves with her, an older and a younger one. The elephant was found in a nearby bush, still breathing, her calves still around. At dusk she was finally shot dead, and her children ran away into the bush. Eventually the elephant will end up in the cast iron pots of the villagers – many of whom see elephant meat as a rare delicacy, why waste perfectly good meat?

I’m in Botswana, in the Eastern Panhandle of the Okavango River, so far away and isolated from the rest of the country that the area is often referred to as “overseas” even by Motswanas. The only way to enter this area is by crossing the river with a somewhat unreliable ferry, as building of the bridge promised by the government a long time ago has once again been deferred. In addition, bringing electricity here is yet to happen, not to mention tarring the main road.

The area of 9800km2 in size is populated by 13000 people and 9000 elephants, and it’s increasing at a faster rate than the human population. Tourism and diamonds have not yet brought employment here to the same extent as in the rest of the country, meaning that majority of the population get their livelihood straight from their fields.

*

Elephants visit these fields during the night and they are not bothered by the bush fences that have been put up in order to stop them. These gentle giants like to feast particularly with watermelons, but also with the rest of the crops found in the fields here: millet, sorghum, maize and pumpkins. What is not deemed edible gets trampled under their enormous weight, and after the elephants have left it’s easy for the cattle, that roam free everywhere, to get in to finish off the destruction.

Even though the elephant is just one of the troubles that the farmers are facing, it is probably the most feared one and also the most significant politically. The hunting of elephants has been banned in this area for years, and contrary to the rest of Africa, the elephant population in Botswana is on the increase. The country’s elephants are officially the property of the government, and the farmers believe that they haven’t done enough to tackle the crop raiding problem. With all this in mind, it’s no wonder that the relationship between elephants and people in the area has gone somewhat sour.

“When both people and elephants have to live in the same area, sharing the same space, there is competition for food and water”, says Anna Songhurst, who is researching human-elephant conflict in the area for her PhD. The locals claim that the damage caused by elephants is getting worse every year, and the problem isn’t going to disappear by itself. New fields are being established all the time, and many of them on ancient elephant pathways.

*

Rra Ndozi is sitting outside his clay hut under a tree. He has lived and farmed the land in this area for all his life (around 90 years), excluding the years spent in the South African mines. The elephants have already raided his field several times this year, and once again his harvest has been poor. But unlike many of the farmers in the area, Rra Ndozi doesn’t think that killing the elephants is the answer to the problem, even though he still recalls the time when selling ivory for the white men was an excellent source of income for the locals. He wouldn’t even touch elephant meat, as it is a totem animal for his tribe. The Bayei believe in people and elephants being one family; the elephants are both our mothers and fathers.

The government pays nominal compensation for crop damages caused by elephants, but the people expect more from them. Even though Rra Ndozi is a very wealthy man with his 100+ cattle herd, he is not willing to invest his own money to build a proper wire fence around his field. He thinks the government should provide money for the farmers to build better fences to protect their fields, or move the elephants away from the area altogether. If the government fails to tackle the problem soon, he thinks that the people in the area will no longer be able to rely on farming as a means of livelihood.

There is no easy solution to the issue, but Anna Songhurst is hoping to utilise her research findings in the search for a possible solution. In the meanwhile, both the elephant and human populations will continue to grow along the Okavango river, the farmers who have lost their harvest will have to come up with other means of providing for their families, and more elephants will be shot in the fields.

Some self-reflection as my time here is nearing its end

A month ago, after my computer had already broken down, I tried writing on a notebook. The topic was ‘Do I love it here?’ This is what I wrote:

***

When we go off on a boat or on a mokoro for a sunset trip in the delta maybe to buy some peppers from a nearby farmer, or just to watch the sun setting over the river, with a little picnic – some beer, maybe wine and a couple of nibbles, tie the boat up to some reeds and just sit there and appreciate the stillness around us, I can’t think of anywhere else in the whole wide world I’d rather be. Or when I wake up in the morning and open my eyes to be greeted by the sunrise right there in front of me without even having to get out of bed – it’s really something special. Or when I have a day of just reading, like today. Nothing else on the agenda, just a long, lazy Sunday to sit in the sun until it gets too hot, and then move to the shade, keep on reading my book. Get lost in Anna Karenina, savour every word until I decide to have a break and do a slow, unrushed pedicure (more out of the need of having to wash my feet properly at least once a week rather than out of vanity – although the green nail varnishI put on today can’t really be described as a necessity…), followed by another unrushed lunch with Anna Songhurst, followed by more Anna Karenina.

I go through moments, hours, even days when I forget about the time and the real world. I forget that this wasn’t always my life and that this is only a passing phase – that the real world is still out there, very much so, and that soon I’m going to have to return to it and pick up my life again from where I left it. Face the same reality.

I’m trying to hang on to every moment, remember that I’m privileged to be here, that I’ll (probably) never have a chance to re-live these moments again. But sometimes I get tired, lonely, fed up. When it’s another long day just sitting in the car counting the cows and donkeys we come across, or walking to a faraway field in the roasting sun with lots of flies around, or asking the same questions again and again from a uninterested farmer who just wants to kill all the elephants and her children are staring at me like I’ve just landed from outer space – and I just want to disappear, be somewhere else, away from the dust and the flies, clean, somewhere where people don’t beat up their dogs with sticks and children have clothes that are not just mere rags.
There is good and bad everywhere but some days I only see the bad. The hopelessness of it all, kids with no future because there are no jobs here, women of my age who’ve never been to school and who will never know anything else in their life but hard work in the fields and who will probably die of AIDS before they reach 40 (the average life expectancy in Botswana is only 33 because of HIV/AIDS).

***

After another month here, I’m beginning to see much more of the good than bad around me. Those moments when I suddenly fill up with love and appreciation for this place are more and more frequent, and now that I know I only have another month left in this country (officially stamped today with the remaining 30 days) I’m feeling very sad because I’m going to have to leave soon. I guess I’m happier now than in a long, long time, living this life, this adventure. Life is so easy here. My life in London often felt like the title of the Milan Kundera book that I’m reading at the moment: Life is Elsewhere. Here it’s easier to seize the moment, to stop and look at the lighting in the distance, the fire hugging the wood, the women sitting in their compound pounding the millet, chatting away, laughing, dirty but happy children crawling or running around making toys of anything they can get their hands on. People are happier here - I’m convinced of that. If only there was a way to stay longer, I’d like to stay. I miss a lot of things from London but if nothing else, I think I’ve learned one significant thing about myself here (apart from discovering watermelons and peanut butter and that I taste good): I love to live in the countryside, with lots of space around, lots of quietness. I like simple life.

The one with more elephants than she can count

After our return from Maun things settled back into the usual routine: six thirty am wake ups, busy days around the Panhandle visiting raided fields and interviewing the farmers, counting elephant footprints on the road, dinners cooked on the campfire, early nights and falling asleep to the sounds of the bush. The week that we’d been away three elephants had been shot in the area, and we had to go and check out the carcasses. It was a sad and a very smelly sight every time. We went to see the mother whose baby we’d tried to rescue, and watched the maggots eating away whatever flesh had been left from the villagers as days went by. A day before the full moon we did a night watch on a road that runs through a major elephant pathway and saw more elephants than I could count. Luckily Anna could count, as that’s the main reason we were there, and got to nearly 300. Finally the number of living elephants I’d seen surpassed the number of dead elephants. I saw lots of breeding herds with babies, adolescents and juveniles lead by a matriarch, lots of male herds and big lone bulls crossing to get to the river. Some of them were crossing quite far and could only be seen with binoculars, others walked past not that far from where our car was parked. One bull crossed just behind the car and headed into a bush where’s I’d gone for a pee only a few minutes earlier. Shame my video camera can’t record video in the moonlight, but I got some great audio recordings anyway.

We attempted a bit of socializing a week after coming back from Maun: Simon hosted a full moon party in the Ndovu camp, but as it was the night after the night watch we were literally asleep by ten and had to head home early.

On the following day (Sunday) we had a very special visitor in our camp. It was the afternoon and I was sitting by the kitchen tent, logging tapes with the headphones on, then decided it was time to light the fire and heat up some water for a shower. I got up and headed to the bushes to get some twigs to get the fire started, when I heard some rustling coming from the bush. At first I thought it was the cows again (they can be a real menace and we’ve had to chase them away from the camp numerous times) but just before I was about to begin my scare-the-cows-routine (which involves running towards them clapping my hands and shouting whatever insults come to mind) I stopped and listened again, for it there was something strange about the noise they were making. It sounded an awful lot like elephants breaking off branches with their trunks and munching them – a sound which I now recognized from doing the night watch. So I decided to wait and observe the situation for a bit, and the more I listened the more I got convinced there was an elephant there. I went to get Graham who was nearby and we tiptoed to the washing line, a closest place we could get safely. He confirmed it was definitely an elephant in there, went to get Anna and his camera and I got my video camera ready. We waited hiding behind the sheets on the washing line and after a few minutes a trunk appeared, then the head of an elephant, then the elephant itself. The young bull then must have got a sniff of us as he turned his head towards us, checked us out, then backtracked to the bush. Shame he didn’t stay long enough to sign the guest book – maybe next time.

Last week we went camping on Wednesday as we were visiting villages far from our home camp. On Thursday we got a call from Graham that another elephant had been shot near were we were. He’d seen people carrying huge bags of blood-dripping meat on the road and there was just too much of it for it to be from a cow. We turned around and drove not really knowing where we were going, until sure enough, we spotted a couple of people who’d loaded up a donkey with fresh meat. A while later we stopped at a compound by the road to ask for directions, and it turned out to be the house of the man who’d shot the elephant. He hopped on to the back and took us to his field, where we witnessed a crowd chopping up the elephant – literally, with their axes, removing any flesh they could. Women, men, children, dogs, everyone going for it. We interviewed the man there and ironically he doesn’t even eat elephant meat (a lot of people don’t due to their religious or other beliefs). I don’t know if Anna will ever forgive me for insisting we go and see it – she said it was one of the hardest things she’s had to do in her life. But it was one of those things I knew I had to film.

On Friday we headed to Namibia as my 60-day visa was about to expire and I had to get it re-stamped. We’d decided to stay across the border for a couple of nights and check out the game reserves there, so we camped in a lovely new lodge called Nunda. The next morning we went to Buffalo game reserve, an old batte field /army base from the civil war and now a forgotten and remote forest on the Caprivi Strip, bordering Botswana. We must have been the only people there that day. We drove around a saw lots of wildlife; different types of antelopes, warthogs, eagles, observed a monkey colony for an hour, had lunch by the river, drove to the border fence to look for evidence of elephants crossing the border (which we saw) and just as we were about to give up for the day we came across a big herd of buffaloes. In the late afternoon we drove to another game reserve and in the first half and hour there saw not just all of the above again but also zebras, giraffes, ostriches – and had some very close encounters with elephants! Here they are obviously not that bothered by people (even though it’s not a busy game reserve by any means, we didn’t come across any other vehicles there either) and one came straight up to our car. Yeah. Elephants are SOOO cool!

Maun, part 2: Operation Rescue the Orphan Baby Elephant (OROBE)

NB: Many days, even weeks has passed since OROBE took place. Without access to a computer, I was unable to record the operation has it happened, but I will try my best to recount the events as accurately as possible.

Where were we? Oh yes, the morning after the night that was supposed to be the hen do but wasn’t, but still we managed to wake up with sore heads in Maun. Phone call re: a shot elephant in the Ndovu camp, which is on the other side of the lagoon from our camp. Mommy elephant dead, two calves orphaned, one of which is apparently only a tiny baby still suckling. What is a true elephant lover to do after receiving such tragic news? Launch a rescue operation, of course. The baby wouldn’t survive for much longer without milk, so we had to act quickly. We made a quick plan: the guys at the camp would catch the baby and bottle feed it with formula milk – they could put the baby in our vegetable garden which was a small but fenced area (only this would require transporting the baby over to our camp on a boat – but this was a minor problem in the plan which we didn’t want to worry about just yet), we would head back the following day and look after it until we’d found a long-term care home for it. The person who reported the dead mother and the orphaned elephants – let’s call him Steve, who’s an old elephant hunter - said he’d hand-reared a baby elephant before and even knew the formula for the milk it would need. All we’d need to do was to get a permission from the Department of Wildlife to catch the baby as otherwise we might to prosecuted for a kidnapping . (And no, we hadn’t forgotten about the bigger calf, but as a three-year-old it should be big enough to survive in the wild and hopefully find the herd again, so it was less of a worry).
Off we went to the Dept of Wildlife to see the Head of God-knows-what and explained the situation and what we were proposing to do (or Anna did, and I enthusiastically nodded, already picturing myself bottle-feeding the baby in our vegetable garden and patting its little trunk, comforting the poor little orphan – aah). The Head of God-knows-what was very understanding, and Anna being a well-connected and respected elephant researcher he agreed to it, on a few conditions: the baby would have to be released into wild once old enough to survive (that was the plan anyway), we would have to find a place that would be willing to rear it before the permission was granted (hmm…), and that we would have to write a letter (you always have to write a letter about everything in Botswana). Obviously time was of essence and we only had hours to save the baby (at some point news came in from “Steve” that the villagers were already lining up to chop up and cook the mother), so off we went to make some phone calls and to write a letter. There is no official place for orphaned elephants in Botswana, so it had to be a private person with the skills and capacity to bring up elephants – easier said than done. The first place Anna tried refused, but the second place, a safari company that do elephant back safaris sounded more promising. Their MD was flying at that moment, so we arranged to meet him at the airport as he landed. The meeting at the airport was followed by another meeting at his office with a vet, and in the end the answer was a maybe. After he’d ordered a chopper to fly to the scene to assess the situation, a new twist to the story took place: the mother was actually still alive, just badly injured. But they decided to go for it: the baby elephant was going to be rescued! The vet managed to get some formula milk organized, and off he went on a plane to complete OROBE. Their plan was to put down the mother, catch the baby and fly it to the elephant back safari camp that very day, before it got dark (I have to say I was slightly disappointed by the fact that my bottle-feeding the baby elephant fantasy would never happen now, but then again I supposes it was more important to actually save the baby in the first place...). We got the letter together and delivered it to the Head of God-knoes-what, and it was all official. Nothing more we could do now, apart from having the hen night and wait until the morning to hear whether everything went to plan.

So the hen night finally took place that night – the hen made it, we made it (just in time), and everyone else had also been able to re-arrange their plans and made it. We dressed Hattie up as a zebra (for she is a zebra researcher marring another zebra researcher), got our blacks and whites on and went on a river cruise for sundowners. A bottle of sambuca was also involved from early on, which probably was one of our not-so-great-ideas. The cruise was followed by a lovely dinner in a new lodge, which we enjoyed so much we didn’t actually make it anywhere else that night. We’d thought of some games involving traditional African wife-skills, such as carrying a bucket of water on head (bucket of water was substituted with a can of beer) and strapping a baby on back and carrying it around the table as fast as possible. Thankfully we didn’t use a real baby as it got dropped many a time.

The next morning Anna found out the fate of Dumbo and the outcome of OROBE. After us running around the whole previous day, letters, permissions, negotiations, phone calls, helicopters, flying a vet to the scene and my shattered dreams of bottle-feeding the little elephant, it didn’t happen. Well, it did, sort of. It was just that the suckling baby and a three-year old calf as reported by the renowned elephant hunter “Steve” turned out to be a two-year and a nine-year old calves – both way too old to be reared by humans not alone flown anywhere, and with fairly good chances of surviving in the wild on their own anyway. The mother was put down and the kids run away to the bush, and that was the end of it. “Steve” was oblivious to the rescue operation and the effort that went into organizing it – we declared him senile there and then.

The rest of our time in Maun was filled with the Maun festival, a two-day affair of live music, stalls and films. It was fun, but by the end of the weekend we were more than ready to head back to the safety of our lovely, peaceful camp. ‘Shattered’ just isn’t strong enough a word to describe how we felt.

We didn’t head straight back however, but stopped to visit the mysterious Tsodilo Hills on our way home. We arrived late at night and camped by the “Female” hill. There was a great thunderstorm not far away from us so we watched the lighting doing its magical light show on the rocky walls, under the thousands of stars. Tsodilo Hills is a sacred place for the San bushmen, believed to be the place where the first creation took place thousands of years ago. There is evidence of human life on the site from some 10,000 years ago with the oldest rock paintings dating back about 4000 years. That’s what we went to see on the following day, as we climbed to the top of the Female Hill and down again. A truly amazing place.


Next day, we headed home. It was great to come back. I’d missed the dusty dirt road, the people, the grinning children waving by the road (whether they’re just excited to see a car, white people, or just us, remains a mystery), the little round mud and grass houses in the villages, the goats, the cows, the donkies, the short boat journey to our island, John the camp guard, our little vegetable garden (to think I’d been ready to sacrifice it for the baby elephant!), the snorting hippo (only one still – the rest of the gang haven’t returned after the cruel killing of the young male), everything. That was my home and I loved it: that’s where I was the happiest.

Maun, part 1

Wow. So much to tell, so little time.

Me and Anna left the camp behind on Monday morning with the boat and mokoro fully packed with our gear, and did a full day's work around Seronga village which involved several interviews with the farmers and a few visits to the fields. It was getting late in the afternoon, and we'd just been to see a field recently raided by elephants. We were just about to turn back into the main road, and checked if there were any cars or donkies or cows coming from the left. None of the usual suspects were there this time, just two young bull elephants. It took me a second or two to process this information. ELEPHANTS!!! FINALLY!!!!! They'd just crossed the road right next to us and were heading back into the bushes. Anna quickly drove to the road so we could get a better view, I tried to pull my camera out (luckily all set up as I'd just done some filming) with my hands shaking like mad from the excitement, and the elephants stopping to check us out. It was a complete high, unlike anything I've experienced before. They were just beautiful, amazing animals, wondeful to look at. My first elephant sighting which I shall never forget!

That night we stayed in Seronga in Jen's little round house (Jen=American peace corp girl), and early in the morning the three of us, plus Jen's neighbour who wanted to get a lift, hit the road with Maun as our destination. Saw hundreds of elephant footprints on the way - they're really starting to come out and move around now, which'll hopefully means a lot more sightings.

We stopped in a croc farm on the way - I'd seen their leaflet where they advertised to rescue problem animals from the river etc, so I had a rosy image of them in my head as a kind of charity and a haven for crocodiles. Little did I know that a crocodile farm does exacty what it says on the package: they farm crocodiles, for meat and for skin. Eeewww!!! The babies were so cute, and there were hundreds of them crammed in a small space.

We made it to Maun in the late afternoon, got some groceries and settle's in at Anna's and Graham's Maun residence. I thoroughly enjoyed my lovely, hot, long shower and a cold Windhoek. We resisted the tempation of hitting the bars as we had a big night planned for the following night: Anna's friend's hen night.

Which didn't quite go to plan. We got all sorted the following day, got our zebra-themed outfits ready (for the hen is a zebra reseracher), had a boat, snacks and drinks organised for sundowners, restaurant booked, etc. We were missing just one thing: the actual hen. We'd been unable to get hold of her all day, but didn't get too worried as her husband-to-be had promised to get her back from the bush in time for the party. By five we were all ready to go, with our stripy tops on, when we finally got a phone call: they'd had a car breakdown. She wasn't going to make it back in time. We considred doing the hen night anyway, maybe dressing Jen up as the hen, me filming it, and Hattie (the bride-to-be) would get the DVD to watch. Or we could try and re-arrange everything for the following night. After some careful consideration and a lot of phone calls, we went with the second option. But we went out anyway just to have a little warm-up, which turned into a big warm-up, which meant we all had very sore heads in the following morning.

So it wasn't the best timing anyway, when Anna got a phone call from Ian, the retired South African hunter who lives near-ish our camp. An elephant had been shot that night in a field in Gunitsoga (our village), she'd run to the place where our boat was docked (i.e. across the lagoon from our camp), and died there. But she'd had two calves with her: one three-year old, one just a tiny baby. Who were waiting there, by the carcass - and they had to be rescued.

To be continued

Q&A

Sunday 26th April (finished on 2nd of May)

A few weeks ago a friend who I'm not going to name sent me a bunch a questions. I've not been able to give her an answer directly to all of them, so I'm going to take this opportunity to reply in public in case anyone else has wondered the same things.

LIVING ARRANGEMENTS?
I'm living in a tent - quite a large, sturdy one, which is not going to blow away with the wind or anything. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I'm sleeping in a tent, and living outdoors, as I don't really spend a lot of my waking time inside the tent.

PERSONAL HYGIENE?
We have a "bathroom" where there is a bucket shower and sink, unfortunately not yet with running water but I believe that Graham is working on it. The bathroom has got reed walls and the sky as a ceiling. It's beautiful.

PERSONAL HYGIENE PART 2
Yes I’ve been shaving my legs while living here.

COMMUNICATION WITH THE LOCALS?
English is an official language of Botswana, but whether people speak it or not depends on how much (if any) schooling they’ve completed. In the rural area where we are people generally don’t speak English beyond a word or two, unless they’ve been to school. Setswana is more commonly spoken, but there are as many different languages as there are tribes, and then dialects of those languages. In our area Humbukushu, Sayei and Sesarwa (=the clicking bushman language) are most common.

I communicate mainly by smiling and waving. No, I’m lucky as we always have a translator with us when we’re working, and everyone working for the project speaks English, some more, some less. My Setswana is limited to about five words: hello, hippo, elephant, work, goodbye. One can get surprisingly far with that! John doesn’t know much English, so there’s a lot of waving and gesturing involved when we speak.

FOOD?
The food is great, because we cook it ourselves. I cook a lot because I like it, and since my laptop broke I don’t tend to have that much to do in the evenings. We eat really well. One would think that camp food is plain and boring but ours is far from it! We get fresh seasonal veggies (peppers, pumpkins, corn, spinach) from the farmers, and whenever we do a shopping trip (about once a fortnight) we stock up. Our favourites are baked potatoes, as there isn’t anything quite like potatoes cooked in tinfoil on fire. We eat them with chilli made with kidney beans, or lentil bolognese, or curry sauce. We’ve made stuffed pancakes a couple of times, carrot soup, stir fries, stuffed cabbage leaves, stews, even fresh bread (baked in a pot), you name it. Most of the time we cook on the fire, but there’s also a gas ring in the kitchen tent.

I was keen to try the local delicacies, having the great cuisine of northern Africa in mind and thinking that surely it can’t be that far from it. It was far from it - really, really far. The locals eat sorghum or millet porridge (cold) with sour milk, pap (maize meal) and meat stews and pumpkin leaves, that’s about it. The first option on the menu I’ve been forced to try once and if I ever have to try it again I’ll know better to say I’m allergic. (This was after interviewing a farmer, they brought out a big pot and handed us all spoons. I tried one spoonful, smiled and said it was delicious; unfortunately I’d had a huge breakfast and was still full from it. The sour milk is just wrong, it’s not only extremely sour but also warm and lumpy, looks like cottage cheese a bit). I’ve had pap once as well, and it was perfectly non-offensive, but quite tasteless and boring. But the local bread is nice, many of the villages have their own bakery and most days we get a fresh loaf of bread for lunch, which we eat with peanut butter. I used to hate peanut butter before I came out here, but I forgot to mention that to Anna, and now it’s too late. It keeps well all day in the hot car. Plus, I’ve kind of got used to it… ok, I actually quite like it now. Some of the bakeries also sell these donut-like things, that are actually just like the Finnish munkki, without the sugar coating. They’re nice.

SPARE TIME?
What do I do on my spare time? Well, during the week there’s not much spare time actually. We leave early in the morning, and often don’t get back until about five or even six, so after the evening is pretty much taken by showers, food preparation and then dinner. I try to read a bit before switching off the light, but often I’m so tired by bedtime I just pass out. I have Sundays off, and the occasional afternoon. I fill up my Sundays with reading books, writing, maybe some yoga, scrubbing my feet (yes they get very dirty in flipflops), baking banana bread, logging my tapes, taking pictures, cleaning my tent, doing some laundry etc, etc – I’m certainly not bored. A recent addition to my list of hobbies is gardening. We’ve now planted our own vegetable garden, and it’s the most exciting thing to check twice a day what has come up and how much it’s grown.
We also go on boat trips a lot. We take sundowners with us – a couple of beers or some wine and snacks, and venture out to the lagoon, past the hippos, park up in the reeds, and watch the sun go down over the delta.

Now. A secret. We have our washing up and laundry done for us by John and Molly, who comes in once a week now to do the laundry. I’m telling you, this is living in luxury! I can’t begin to tell how grateful I am for Molly – hand washing all your clothes all the time is not fun!

TRANSPORT?
We move around by boat, car and foot. Mainly car. No, there’s no escape from the camp on days off, but I wouldn’t actually even want to escape. I thoroughly enjoy not having to go anywhere, as we travel so much during the week.


ANYWHERE TO ESCAPE FROM THE BUSH?
No towns or cities nearby where to spend spare time. Gunitsoga is the nearest village to our camp, walking distance away when there’s no flood, and there’s a “bar” (i.e. a metal shack) there that sells cold beer and soft drinks for emergencies. Seronga is the nearest larger village, about half an hour drive (plus a boat out of the camp first) away. They have a few more metal shacks that sell beer there, that’s about it. Shakawe is a two/three hour drive, and a ferry crossing away, they have a big supermarket there. (We do our supplies stock-up in Swakawe, although the ferry crossing is a nightmare at the moment – last time we went over we couldn’t get back that night anymore because of the huge queue. We got in the queue at 4.30. Last ferry is at 6.30, and we didn’t make it across. Thank God for Jen the American peace corp girl in Seronga knew someone in Shakawe, who kindly let us stay at his place that night). Then finally, there’s Maun, about 7-10 hours away, depending on a lot of things. Maun deserves its own chapter.

COLLEAGUES?
The team consists of Anna, the principal investigator, Nature, the translator, 13 enumerators (one in each village) and me, the assistant investigator and a videographer (I made up that title, sounds much better than just an assistant eh?). So on any day it’s usually four of us going around.

ANIMALS SPOTTED SO FAR?
The animals I’ve seen in the wild so far include: monkey, impala, hippo, elephant (added later), crocodile, snakes (including a cobra), spiders (only fairly harmless ones), toads and countless birds (amazingly beautiful ones) and insects.

TEMPERATURE?
The temperature varies somewhere between 10 and 40 degrees C. It’s hot during the day, usually around 30-35 C and colder at night, probably around 15 C. It’s getting colder now that it’s coming up to winter.

THE HUTS IN TARZAN FILMS?
Yes people live in round mud huts just like those that can be seen in the Tarzan films. In fact (this is going to be particularly interesting to any markets researchers reading this) in our questionnaires we determine the social class (or wealth rank) based on the type of roof and walls that a respondent has – and a number of cows they own. Only white people, or very rich villagers (such like chiefs) live in a house made from bricks and iron. Most common combo is mud/grass, or mud/reeds. Around the hut there is usually a compound, or a yard which is actually the living room and the kitchen. The compound is fenced with reed wall for privacy.

***

And finally, the GPS cordinates for our camp are:
18º49'57.81"S
22º35'56.26"E
...in case anyone wants to pop round for a cup of tea (I can even manage fresh coffee). The cordinates should work in google earth.

Raj, I'm still to see the elephants showering themselves with their trunks but I remain hopeful! :-)