From the Okavango Delta to the Namib Desert...

Jambo (‘hello’ in Swahili) from Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania!!  It has been 3 weeks since our last update – sorry about that! You’ll soon read why, but let me preface the coming travelogue by explaining that if Africa is completely unpredictable! We found no Internet facilities in some ‘more civilized’ places, yet ample connection in places like Rwanda! Imagine that! Unfortunately, though, our time in those places with good connections was limited over the past 3 weeks, so we just never managed to send out updates…
 

Ok – let’s get started… We left off at Victoria Falls (Livingstone, Zambia) waaaaaayyyy back at the end of July. Our next stop from there was Botswana, the reputed ‘big game’ capitol of Africa. We took at amazing flight (dubbed appropriately ‘The Flight of Angels”) that passed directly over the Falls, followed the path of the Zambezi upstream, and set down at Kasane, Botswana, a small town just off the border of 4 countries: Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Botswana. 

My first glimpse of Botswana satisfied what little I had read – it is clean and organized, and most Africans will tell you it has one of the best local governments on the continent. The infrastructure is excellent. However, due to the migrant mining workers that make up much of its population, Botswana suffers a staggering 39% HIV-infection rate (from a June issue of The Economist). We headed straight to the ‘bush’, though, and saw no evidence of any disease. 

One side note about Botswana’s history, though. Most people attribute its success as a nation to its lack of European colonization. ‘How did Botswana possibly avoid that, given the fates of nearby Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, et al?’ I asked. Here is the amazing answer. The tribesmen of Botswana were quite sharp, and in the 1800s looked around and saw the colonization taking place all around them. They also saw how other tribes were slaughtered as they tried to resist the grips of European advance. As a result, they adopted an ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ attitude: The chiefs of the three more powerful tribes set off for England, with the hopes of begging the Queen’s mercy. The three chiefs arrived in London, fresh off the boat from Africa and in full tribal regalia, and made their way to Buckingham Palace to seek an audience. (Can you imagine that? Has anyone made this story into a movie yet???) The Queen naturally denied them. (Imagine that conversation: Doorman: Ugh, your highness, there are three naked African men at the front door wearing ostrich feathers on their heads. Queen: What do they we want? Doorman: To see you, I think… Queen: Yeah, sure, let them in, and tell the Pink elephants and the men from Saturn that I’ll be right with them too…) So the Queen refused to see them despite the fact that these same men showed up at her door each day. Finally, after 3 weeks, she caved in. (Please note the jump in the story here – what the heck did these guys do in London for 3 weeks in the meantime? This has GOT to become a film someday.) As the story goes, she was the so charmed by the men as to declare Botswana an English protectorate, with the people free to govern themselves with the full endorsement and protection of the Crown. There is an interesting footnote, however. In 1966, the Botswanans sought full independence from England and wanted to really make a go of life on their own. England, having searched the country high a low for gold and diamonds and finding none at all, decided there was little value in Botswana and set the nation on its independent way. And shortly thereafter, in 1967, the largest diamond mine in the world was found in Botswana!! Hmmm… Pretty clever, those people…
 
Anyway, back to our much-less-interesting-than-that-story journal… We caught another small plane from Kasane to Chief’s Camp, which sits on a sizable island in the middle of the Moremi Game Reserve in Northern Botswana. This park sits in the famed Okavango Delta, where a lot of the stuff you see on Discovery Channel actually takes place. Chief’s was beautiful, but ironically the game was not as good as what we had seen earlier. There was a TON of action around the camp, though. People couldn’t get into their room one night due to a rogue hippo blocking the way, and most of the camp was woken up the next night by the screams of baboons – it seems a leopard had tired of impala and killed a baboon for supper instead. Frankly, I was confused, though. We drove 3 hours across sandy, dusty, dirty, bumpy roads to stare at a leopard and a dead impala in a tree, but no one was willing to show me the baboon/leopard tracks in camp and where that one was hiding. It was kind of frustrating. When you added that to the fact that the camp was full of American tourists (and to date, we had only met tourists and no Africans whatsoever), we began to bag the game drives. One afternoon we opted for a mokoro (local dugout canoe) ride instead and we really enjoyed that. Lots of birds and insects and little stuff to see. Sometimes you have to get away from the tourists who tell the guide ‘right, let’s drive straight to the big cats and drive straight back.’ Cathy and I found that we definitely prefer the little stuff. A lilac-breasted roller is the most gorgeous bird you have EVER seen. It is the color of dawn and dusk all at once – pinks, purples, blues, and greys (please look it up – it’s worth it). The difference between a hippo track and a rhino track is pretty cool. A spider-wasp is a pretty impressive insect – it clicks as it flies in search of spiders to paralyze and lay its eggs on! And there might not be a bird (except the bald eagle, I guess) as majestic and regal looking as the African Fish Eagle. Its piercing ‘Kee-Yaa’ cry will always remind me of Africa… We left Chief’s after two nights and headed up the road to Stanley’s Camp, which was really more of the same. The difference – really – was that Stanley’s was a bit less ‘wild’ and we were actually allowed to walk with our guide. We did, and almost got ourselves surrounded by a group of angry Cape Buffalo. 

Amazing thing about the Cape Buffalo – they just turn and stare at you. And stare, and stare, and stare. And they don’t move. You feel immediately scared AND guilty (‘What are you looking at? I didn’t spike the punch at the Prom, I swear!’) I wonder if facing down a herd of buffalo is in some ways more scary that meeting a lion in that regard. At the least the lion doesn’t make you feel like you did something wrong! We also met up with two Americans we had spent time with at Chief’s – it seems most folks do both camps in the same trip. They were good fun and we enjoyed dragging good tourist stories out of our guide. Our favorite may have been the French guy stuck in camp alone with 9 Americans from New York. The Americans apparently teased this guy silly, and on one game drive it seems he had enough. Just after passing by a pride of lions, another round of French jokes surfaced among the Americans. The guide laughed along and turned to check on the Frenchman, and was shocked to find him absent from the car! This guy had decided the Americans were too much to take – he preferred to chance it witht lion pride and WALK back to camp rather than spend another minute with the New Yorkers. They found him up a tree about four hours later, shivering with fear! The other great one involved a water bottle. At Chief’s and Stanley’s the nights are quite cold and hot water bottles are left in your bed during turndown. Interestingly, the lodge designer chose to cover the bottles in a leopard-skin type cloth to add to the ‘safari experience.’ Apparently, a man came back from dinner following a game drive where he saw some big cats. Exhausted, he hopped into the sack and felt a warm body at his feet. Feeling its smooth suede fabric, and glimpsing its leopard pattern, he jumped out of bed and began pounding it with an umbrella and blowing his whistle for help. The guides and the manager breathlessly arrived to find him still whacking away at the ‘leopard.’ Shocked and amazed at the man’s diligence, they finally – amidst fits of hysteria – managed to pull back the covers fully to show that, yes, he had indeed beaten a water bottle into complete submission… 

We spent one night at Stanley’s Camp, and then we were off. As a result, we stayed in Bots only 3 nights and we would definitely have liked to see more. We realized we completely skipped the Kalahari Desert and all Botswana cities. This was a shame. One couple we met at Chief’s went out with a bushman in the Kalahari who caught them a scorpion (cool!) and even showed them the termites Bushmen eat for protein and had them taste them (even cooler!). Any trip back to Botswana we take with surely include the capital (Gabarone) and the desert… Two final notes on Bots: first, the money is called ‘Pula’, which is also the name for rain. As a desert country, water is quite precious there. Also, a big problem in the Okavango comes from the Bushmen setting fires. Here’s why. During the rainy season the rains come and rivers overflow in the Delta. Normal grasslands become ponds and lakes and the Bushmen take to fishing. However, fish prove hard to catch among the trees and reeds. So during the dry season, the sneak around and burn whole areas of land, effectively ‘mowing’ them so they’ll hold more catch-able fish when the rains come. And how do Bushmen catch fish, you might ask? Get this: there is a berry that they toss into the water. The fish eat it, it poisons them, and they die. However, the fish meat is not tainted and the Bushmen safely eat the fish! Who the heck figured that out? And how did they do it????
 
From Botswana we flew to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Namibia was colonized by the Germans (who realized that they’d better get into some land in Africa along with the Brits, the Belgians, and the French) and it shows. Gorgeous flat roads, electricity all around, a very modern airport, and everything on time – very ‘first world.’ One of the highlights of Namibia (there were many) was the flying. The landscape is simply spectacular and I could never do it justice in print. Once I get a few photos on-line you’ll see for yourselves! I have to mention one particular place that looms large in my African experience to date, though. We passed over an absolutely flat expanse at one point, punctuated only by two small rounded mountains right next to each other, each exactly the same shape and height (probably 2500 feet or so). These twin peaks were starkly protruding from the flat landscape around them. I was sitting in front next to the pilot so I grabbed a headset and asked him what they were. He sheepishly blushed. I persisted. ‘Well,’ he explained gingerly, ‘it’s no secret that African tribesmen are attracted to their women by certain physical attributes.’ ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Well,’ he finished, ‘those are called the Omatakos, loosely translated as the woman’s buttocks. I cracked up. It was the perfect name. So I challenge all my knucklehead single buddies reading this – next time you meet a nice girl tell her you love her Omatakas and see how far that gets you!!!! We spent the night in Windhoek (also the name of a very good Namibian beer) at ate a Portuguese restaurant. Why Portuguese, you might ask? Well, Angola is Namibia’s neighbor to the north and it was once a Portuguese colony. Thus quite authentic Portuguese cooking can be found throughout Angola, Namibia and South Africa. 

From Windhoek we headed to Northern Namibia, to the Etosha Salt Flats. We stayed at a place called the Ongava Lodge. Ongava was pretty cool, but we were pretty sick of sitting in the back of Land Rovers for 6 hours a day at this point. We did see Rhino pretty close up, though, and that was amazing. Also, turns out Ongava means ‘rhino’ in the local dialect. Both White Rhino and Black Rhino are plentiful in Etosha, and we managed to see both. They live apart, however, and have many differences. Black Rhinos tend to be smaller and a bit more aggressive due to their territoriality. Both types are quite endangered these days though. In fact, White Rhinos were near extinct and were taken down to 36 in total not too long ago. They have since rebounded quite nicely but remain fragile due to one important factor. The existing 14,000 or so Rhino all hold the same genetic makeup of the original 36. So in a sense, they are all inbred, and thus are much more susceptible to disease. Another interesting side note or two on Rhinos. Black Rhinos are not black and White Rhinos are not white. The name ‘White’ Rhino was a corruption of the Dutch or Afrikaans word ‘widge’, meaning WIDE! Naturally it stuck, and the other type of Rhino came to be called ‘black’ in contrast. Our guide also explained to us another difference in terms of modern life: ‘The white people,’ he explained, ‘push your babies around in strollers in front of you. We black people ride as babies on our mother’s backs. The same is true of Rhinos – the baby White Rhino always walks ahead of the mother, and the baby Black Rhino always walks behind the mother.’ The real reason is that almost all animal babies walk in front of the mother, save for the Black Rhino. This is because the Black Rhino forages for leaves, roots, and shrubs, and walks in dense thickets. The mother goes in front to clear a path for the little one. We also saw Oryx for the first time at Ongava and they are beautiful creatures. They are members of the antelope family and both males and females have long slender spiral horns. Their bodies are grey, but the faces are divided into an amazingly ordered ‘mask’ of jet black and snowy white. The black and white faces are crucial to the animals’ survival, we were told. The markings actually make up a sophisticated ‘water-cooler’ mechanism that allows the Oryx to outclass the camel in terms of time they can go without water. Apparently the white snout allows the Oryx to cool the desert air by 5 degrees or more as it is taken in – this condenses when it gets to the black part of the snout and becomes water droplets in the animal’s mouth. Thus it drinks while breathing! Animals like the Oryx really make you believe in the miracle of nature.

From Ongava we were off to Swakopmund, a small fishing village on the west (Atlantic) coast of Namibia. Swakopmund is surrounded by sand dunes and as a result is perpetually shrouded in fog. The Atlantic currents are quite cold there (meaning seals, whales, and GW sharks) and this mixes with the desert heat to cause the fog. Much of Namibia is desert – the Namib Desert runs just along its Atlantic coast and is the 2nd largest (to the Sahara) in Africa. Apparently the Germans built Swakopmund as a port because it lies on pretty much a straight line west from Windhoek – a road and train line run between the two to this day. It’s pretty cool, really – you emerge from these golden sand dunes into this fog-covered town, complete with German architecture, fishing boats, jetties, beaches, etc. Swakopmund is a mirage if there ever was one! I went for a great run along the beachfront there, and marveled that I was just across the Atlantic from Rio de Janiero! 

On our arrival on Swakopmund we enjoyed fresh Namibian oysters and checked e-mail. The next day was one of our best to date on this trip. We started by heading to Walvis Bay, about 30 km south of Swakopmund. Walvis Bay is a more sheltered harbour, and many Southern Right Whales and Humpbacks stop off there to mate and/or take a break from the Atlantic current. Cathy and I hopped on a boat with 4 Italians and made off for some whale watching. As a side note, Italian tourists are some of the funniest in the world – during the entire wet, freezing cold ride out into the harbor, one Italian guy stood on one leg, held one bare foot in the air, and held a wet sock into the drizzling wind. Apparently one foot slipped into the water climbing aboard and he thought he’d do better to hold the wet sock in the cold air instead of just grinning and bearing it. At first, I thought this guy was the first mate or something – standing near the captain with one bare foot in the air, balancing on the other, and holding up a primitive windsock to measure the wind speed and direction for whale watching purposes or something. I thought, ‘Let me outta here! No way this is a serious operation!’ I soon figured it out, though, and laughed at the random, Vonnegut-type nature of it all. (To wit: I’m on a boat putting out from Walvis Bay, a German port in Namibia. We are going whale watching. There is blue sea and fog ahead of me. There are enormous golden sand dunes reached up to 200 feet high behind me. There is a funny bearded man with one bare foot balancing on his other not-bare foot and holding a wet sock into the on-rushing cold, wet air. He is talking to the Captain in broken English. I fear for my life, if not for my sanity… You get my point, right? I think it’s a great opening chapter for a book or something.) In any event, this turned out to be great fun. We saw a whale (a humpback) but he was quite shy and kept diving deep. Apparently most will stay at the surface and pose a bit. We probably got within a few hundred feet of him and that was enough for me. That humped, rounded back just gracefully arches down into the water with barely a ripple, and the whale is gone without a trace. Amazing to see, really. We left the whale and headed off to the seal colony, which we thought was a real stinker, literally. The smell of a seal colony rivals only the smell of a bat cave in terms of pure vomit-inducing ability (for more on the Bat Cave, look for my Uganda update, coming soon). To put off the smell, Cathy and I laid flat on the prow of the boat and giggled like school kids as dolphins swam and criss-crossed ahead of our path. We dragged our hands into the water and they would inch ever closer so you could touch them but would pull away at the last second… We forgot all about the seals and could have busied ourselves for hours with the dolphins. We jumped up when we heard a clatter and some yells from the back of the boat, though, and were SHOCKED to find a 300-400 lb Cape Fur Seal sitting up at attention on the bench at the back of the boat, surrounded by stupefied Italians. And we were stupefied too. It may have been the first time in my life I saw something and it just totally DID NOT register as being possibly real. But there it was. I did a double take, just like in the cartoons. 

Apparently 3-4 alpha males of the colony allowed themselves to be tamed by the boat operators. In one swift, powerful motion, the launch out of the water and land right in the rear middle of the boat. They are perfectly well behaved and will sit there as long as they are fed fish. They are quite shameless, though, and will suffer all sorts of tourist-pawing to get their free meal. Seals do, however, like most pets; love to be scratched behind the ears. I would say this seal was really cute, if cute is a word that applies to an animal of that enormity. Cathy would say cute, or adorable. I – using my infinite ability as a wordsmith - just said ‘wow.’ So after meeting 2-3 seals just this way, rubbing their ears, scratching their chests, pawing at their flippers, and emptying our fish bucket, we headed back to land with enormous smiles all around. 

We thought the day was over, but it wasn’t – halfway back from Walvis Bay to Swakopmund we turned off into the sand dunes and entered a racetrack of sorts carved into the sand. Paths went this way and that, criss-crossing the dunes with lattice-like design. It was a quad bike rental place!!! We jumped on bikes and headed off into the golden sand. I’m not sure what it is exactly about a blue sky that makes things stand out so much, but it never seems to fail. A light blue sea looks that much more light blue next to the perfect blue sky. The green fields of Ireland look that much more green next to a blue sky. A white house looks that much more white, etc, etc. You get the idea. I never thought sand could look so amazing and so inviting, so golden yellow and red, but it did…next to the bluest of blue skies. We flew around those dunes with wild abandon – memories of seals and dolphins and whales tantalizing our brains, which still couldn’t comprehend that we could ride bikes over sand dunes the very same day. We rode and drove and spun and laughed until the sand permanently wedged itself in between our teeth, our smiles were so big. We stopped atop the biggest dunes and looked out at the infinite shifting sands. We’d then look in the other direction at the sparkling white caps breaking out in the marine blue sea. It was stunning. We really needed that day, I think, after all the sedentary game drives of the previous weeks, including the same bush landscape over and over. It was a great change of pace for us. We collapsed to sleep in that night, thoroughly happy with our day in Swakopmund.
 
The next day it was off to Wolwedans Camp, which was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Manhattan is bread and water for the eyes, the African landscape can be a feast for the eyes, but Wolwedans in Namibia was a 10-course, gluttonous, heads-of-state, celebratory, over-the-top, best-food-and-wine-available meal. 

The flight to Wolwedans was a study in the color spectrum as it shifts from yellow to red. I promise you every subtle color from gold to orange to rust was represented along the way. Wolwedans lies nestled into sand dunes on a wide expanse between craggy burnt mountains. Its sky is the richest blue you can imagine, it’s sand dunes the richest of reds. These colors were complimented by bright yellow grasses, pale greens weeds, and the occasional black, white, and grey Oryx (in contrast against a blue sky or a red dune) to create the sort of bold, broad, colorful paradise that the impressionists would have loved to paint. I suppose that if Cezanne went to heaven, it might be Wolwedans for him. Cathy and I aren’t photo-hounds by any means, but we snapped an entire roll just heading to the lodge from its airport. Its one of those places that is so gorgeous that it extends beyond physical beauty into the spiritual world. There were no game drives (and no game, aside from the wandering Oryx and the myriad types of beetles and lizards, all of which left the coolest tracks to find the next morning. In the desert, they call such tracks ‘the bushman’s newspaper’ since in reading it, he can piece together all that happened the previous night. We ate great meals, enjoyed good company, and rode out to distant mountains or landmarks in the daytime. At night we slept outside amongst the stars (no mosquitoes in the desert) and marvelled at their clarity and number. The Milky Way was always one inch beyond my reach, it was so close. We fell asleep each night to desert breezes, crickets, and starlight that you could read by. I can only further punctuate our experience there by saying: go to Namibia, and go to Wolwedans. The place is spiritual.

I’m all typed out for now, and I think the hotel might need its PC back in order to actually book a few rooms or something, so that’s all for now! Next up – Uganda/Rwanda Journal + Zanzibar and Pemba Islands. (I am almost caught up!)
 
All the Best,
Ben & Cathy