Bearish Bumbles

09/07: The Okavango Delta

Category: Bumbling | Posted by: Cads

Botswana is covered in Kalahari sand. 80% of the country is sand. The Okavango delta is Kalahari sand with a difference. It's covered in water. The sand becomes swamp where the Okavango fades into the ground. There are islands where elephant and crocodiles roam, where leopards wander and where fantastic birdlife roosts. It is also the slow moving, sluggish pace of hippos. There's no rush here, unless you count papyrus. There is just time to soak in the cool and bask in the heat.

Guma lagoon is 13km along a sand ... thing. I'd call it a road, but ruts and no verges and only a vague indication of direction established by an inner sense of rightness doesn't count as a road. The lagoon is a vast gulp of water in a parched and thirsting landscape. The green assaults you as much as the heat from the Namibian desert overwhelms the senses. A wooden deck in front of a bar hangs tantalising over crocodile and snake infested water. Midges and mosquitoes and insects of all vampiric varieties are fended off with DEET and "mozzie rep". But the tranquility is everything. It holds us in its palm and tells us that despite the danger, here all is right. Our eyes drink in the sight of the water even as our skin pulls the moisture right out of the air.

Even as we run up a bar tab, the helter-skelter pace of the previous days starts to slow to a more manageable crawl. This is a welcome respite and sure, we might be sleeping in tents, getting up early to go over to an island, having lukewarm showers, but this is our haven of sanity. It is easy to imagine Rudyard Kipling writing about the "great grey green greasy Limpopo" looking out over water such as this. The Everglades and the fens are just pale imitations of what truly lazy water can be.

The next morning is a late morning - 7:30 start. But we are up and awake already, watching sunrises that pull in images of New Zealand to overlay on this most african canvas. A boat comes to pick us up at a rickety jetty and takes us across to Mokoro Island. This is an island in the delta that the Mokoro polers use as a base of operations. They store their boats and their poles there, because from the lodge to the polable delta there is very little shallow water. The lazy pace of the dugouts (fibreglass replicas now) doesn't begin to hint at the effort that must be applied to punt 200kgs of tourist and bags through hippo-created channels. We don't get to see any hippos, but the delta is very rich in birdlife. Thimba is our guide and takes us on a couple of nature trails over the next 2 days and we get to learn a lot about the wildlife from spoor, footprints and direct contact.

Thimba is a walking National Geographic issue. He uses phrases such as "this forest collosus" as part of his speech. He delivers this with Jesse Jackson's intonation and gravitas. At each branch or interesting piece of vegetation, a different evangelist for the environment is channeled through this normally shy and meek man. Without him we would have a very bland and insipid experience, with him we investigate Vervet Monkey trails and clean our teeth with tree roots. A quick aside here, I have wanted to clean my teeth with this root ever since Emma told me that she used to do the same in Ethiopia. I finally feel I am getting closer to what makes her tick. She has seen my childhood homes, driven past my school, and relived moments that I rarely admit even to myself. There are whole gaps in her history that I want to fill in. Cleaning my teeth with a tree root is a moment that connects the childhood me with the childhood her. I feel a little more whole.

There are elephants on the island. They eat the leaves and rub the trunks of the trees all around, devastating the vegetation. We see them when we get to our camp site (just a place out in the open near the shore of a small island in the delta - this is proper camping, except that one of our guides has brought a loo seat for us just in case!) The prospect of elephants wandering through the camp is worrying, a little. Hippos frighten us more - what if we happen to be camping in their territory? Hippos are fiercely territorial and will attack anything that is seen as a threat. Norm sees a snake that night, possibly a boomslang (according to the guide) or a black mamba (Norm and a photograph in a book). All I know is that I'm glad I didn't see it, and that when we woke up, none of us was flattened by elephant paws.

Again we are in the Mokoro. This is the way to travel. We sit back, relax, look at bee-catchers, lotus flowers, hippo footprints underwater (they like sandy bottoms, and the currents are softened by the vast seas of reeds). The sun warms us, hiding its onslaught in the cool of the water. The sunburn only kicks in later... I could come back here, learn to fish and show tourists the baobab trees and antelope running madly away from some predator. The Okavango draws you in, and in true swamp fashion, has a hard time letting you go. It is a slow pull into its grip, but it is relentless and woe betide you if you struggle. You might escape by quietly moving on, but it will stay with you anyway.