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The Real Delta
You can fly into one of Botswana’s many Okavango Delta lodges any time, pay big bucks, get spoiled and experience the beguiling swamplands’ sacred beauty.
Or you can go on an expedition in the Delta’s magical wetlands, carrying all you need in dugout canoes and camping on the islands with no fences between you and the wild things. Don Pinnock and a group of Getaway readers embarked on just such an adventure.
It’s tempting to start with the dramatic…
The deadly black mamba in the toilet enclosure; our group being driven by heat to swim in the heavily crocodiled Boro River; the huge hyena scavenging through the camp kitchen.
But these are side issues, distractions from what the Okavango Delta experience was all about. They provide dinner conversation and bragging points. What lasts as nostalgic memory, however, is slipping silently in a mokoro (dugout canoe) along lily-sprinkled channels of dark, clear water, hearing the plunge of red lechwe in the reed beds, watching huge fan palms, jackalberry, sausage and rain trees drift by. It’s sitting around a fire at night with stars tangled in overhead branches and the roar of lions on the move as we tucked into our tents. It’s the birds of Moremi.
We met at Maun International Airport, which was reminiscent of the time back when World War II Dakotas were still doing passenger runs. After shopping, we climbed into an open Land Cruiser and were soon trundling out of town at a steady 60km/h and into mopane woodland. Sleek cows that mooed incessantly for no reason and goats in tight thug gangs eyed our passing.
Destination: buffalo-proof fence. It’s to keep cows from buffs or the other way around, this being cattle country and foot-and-mouth disease invokes serious paranoia. It didn’t look anything-proof where we met the polers and their mekoro (that’s the plural of mokoro). They piled an inordinate amount of gear into the slender boats and were soon slipping silendy through the clear water and white water lilies with buttercup-yellow centres.
It was time to assess the party. Apart from the polers and their chief, Julius Mpontshang, there was Dave and Liz Snodgrass, Athol and Sandy Grieve, Torben and Lisbeth Roug and Di Jones plus Safari and Guide Services guys Peter Comley, Joseph Mosheti, Jeremiah Kavoyo, Frank Chikosi and Shaka Maphaa, the chef.
Being poled means lounging like a colonial dignitary watching beauty drift by. Bumps on the reeds proved to be small, speckled painted reed frogs catching the sun. They were unfazed enough to sit on your finger.
We made camp on one of the Delta’s 50 000 islands and ate roast potatoes, chicken legs, patty pans and salad plus fried bananas in custard. Oh, and red wine. The hardship of camping….
The Way of the Waters
The Okavango Delta is beguiling. In summer, tropical storms rumble and flash across the high Benguela Plateau in central Angola. Water pours off steep slopes, gathering sand, leaching salts from the sodden earth and picking up speed as it gutters down long, straight valleys. By the time it reaches the northern border of Botswana it has become Southern Africa’s third largest river.
Here it channels into the Okavango Panhandle on a wide, meandering journey towards the Gumare Fault, a tectonic extension of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa.
It is thought that the Okavango, together with the Chobe and Zambezi, once flowed into a vast lake covering what is now the dry Makgadikgadi Pans.
Geological faulting gradually tilted and lifted the Earth’s surface, diverting two of the rivers northwards to their present courses and causing a great trough, which absorbed the flow of the Okavango.
Over time this filled with silt, windswept sand and organic debris, becoming a delta which today looks like the leg and claws of an eagle – or, as someone suggested while peering at the map, a great green cannabis leaf.
‘You wouldn’t last three minutes,’said Julius. After that it seemed a good idea to get back into the mekoro
The Kalahari, a huge semi-desert covering most of Botswana, is exceptionally flat: across 250 kilometres of the Delta, the elevation drops a mere 61 metres. Water which falls in the Angolan highlands in December and which pours into the Panhandle at a staggering 11 cubic kilometres a year, takes six months to fill the Okavango’s furthermost channels and, on good years, reaches Maun. Once in the Delta, the only place for the waters to go is up: swallowed each year by the atmosphere through evaporation and plant transpiration. That’s 16 000 square kilometres of vanishing water.
The Spider Run
Dawn slowly silhouetted the island’s imposing trees and a clamorous spur-fowl took over from a fiery-necked nightjar enquiring, in a querulous voice, “Did sleep deliver us?” After breakfast we went for a walk and Peter, our guide, maintained a worried look because he could smell buffalo.
I then made a discovery: those in the party were mostly birders. So it became five steps, scope,discussion, ID, five more steps, scope. Discussion. I like birds, but…. With plenty of time on my hands, I took to imagining what the birds were saying. I decided the mourning dove was really a dove of peace, calling pleadingly “No more war”. A black-crowned tsagra was the mournful one, saying “I’m not cheerful. I’m not cheerful.”
Eventually, after much scoping and discussion, we packed up and set off through reeds – miscanthus and phragmites – which rained spiders. “Why go through the reeds when there’s the Boro River nearby?” I asked Julius, who was doing the guiding. “The channels belong to the hippos,”he replied. So it was spiders or hippos.
The following day, after a hot walk, we all eyed the cool waters with much longing. “Can we swim here?” we asked Julius. “Oh yes,” he said, “as long as it’s on white sand. Crocs don’t cross white sand in daylight.” Could he find some white sand? “Sure, in the Boro River.”
After much humming and hawing we all got in the mekoro and poled over to see. Sure enough, there was a clear patch between dark walls of croc-concealing aquatic plants. Who would be first bait? Torben leaped overboard with a splash and we were soon all in, keeping a watch for logs with eyes. An hour later we were still there, all uneaten. Could we have a night swim, I asked. “You wouldn’t last three minutes,” said Julius. After that it seemed a good idea to get back into the mekoro.
We set off again early next morning into a delicious dawn. This was how it was supposed to be. We poled slowly up the Boro River as the sun rose behind us, bathing the reeds, trees and us in golden light. Fish eagles threw back their heads and greeted the dawn, a honeyguide offered to show us a hive, jacanas padded over lily leaves and herons pondered the shallows for unsuspecting frogs. It was an eerily isolated beauty in no urgent need of beholders – an invitation to commit poetry or philosophy or any number of higher or contemplative crimes.
We beached – actually we drove up flattened reeds – and then we strolled through high-tree parkland and then mopane woodland. There were soggy places where warthogs had been nose-shovelling and hundreds of aardvark holes, some clearly colonised by warthogs. The grass was nipple-high and of mammals we saw nothing.
“I came to see animals,” Torben grumbled to the guides. “The grass is too high,” said Peter, “wait for Moremi.”
That evening, as we watched a poler hauling tilapia out of the water with a handline, a huge, anvil-shaped cloud swallowed the sun. That night the hammer descended. As we sat eating chicken with veg and water-lily stew, the south began to flicker. “Far away, that storm,” Peter pronounced.
An hour later we all trooped to the edge of the reedbed to watch bolts of searing lightning hammering unfortunate trees not too far off.
Around midnight a blast of wind rolled over my igloo tent and I groped around in the dark trying to right it from the inside. It was like being in one of those bubbles kids use to walk on water. The best way to hold it was to lie on my back in the middle with my feet against the windward poles.
From that odd position I was soon mopping puddles from imperfectly tied window flaps as rain thundered down. It was a long night.
Eventually, after four days of drifting, hiking, eating and dreaming, we packed the mekoro and headed for the buffalo-proof fence. There we beached at the polers’ village and transferred to vehicles tor the ride to Maun to resupply before heading for Xakanaxa on Moremi Island.
Long before we got there elephants appeared, some bathing in muddy wallows, some destroying mopane trees, others caring for calves. One gave us a long, thoughtful lookover from about 10 metres, another threw branches at us and told us to buzz off. By the time we got to the reserve gate there were herds of them, plus giraffes batting long eyelashes at us, impala, kudu and a fine, spotted hyena near what must have been a nearby kill, given the number of moody vultures.
Exploring Moremi
By the time we arrived, the camp had been set up under jackalberry trees at the water’s edge. As we sat chatting that evening, a large, spotted hyena came to see what was cooking and stole some chicken scraps. A beautiful beast with bad press. He was prowling among the tents soon after we turned in. I hoped nobody had to do a midnight toilet run.
Next morning we were in the 4×4 nosing along the sandy trails and came across a magnificent bull giraffe doing its treetop munch backed by a forest in glorious light. “Oh look at that,” said Dave, “there’s an oxpecker under its tail.” All the binoculars zoned in on the beast’s speckled bum.
Birders have avian tunnel vision. We stopped to see some red lechwe delicately nibbling grass. “Beautiful yellow saddle,” exclaimed Liz. Yellow saddle on a red lechwe? “And just look at that beak!” I turned to find all the binos on a distant saddle-billed stork. And see that stick up in the tree? Well next to that’s a Meyer’s parrot. Oh, it’s gone.. ”
What was still there was the inevitable red-billed spurfowl. They are small brown balls of indecision. As you approach in a vehicle you can almost see their thought process.
“There’s a large object approaching, what shall I do? Road or grass? Oh dear, it’s getting closer. Run or fly?” But by then it’s almost under your wheels and still frantically deciding. “Road? Grass? Omigod! Road? No, too exposed. Grass? Yes grass. Now! Run….”
Seeing unblinking yellow eyes staring at you out of the moonless blackness can be seriously unnerving…
You wait for the thump as your tyre turns it into road-kill, but it erupts out the side into the grass, then stops and looks back to see if that was the right decision.
Later that afternoon, in the slanting rays of the very African sun, we drove through woodlands that were parklike and glorious.
Lechwe and waterbuck grazed, hippos huffed and stickle-backed crocs slid into the pools like giant cheese graters. Massive white thunderheads were building and were soon rumbling and flashing, finally releasing legs of rain – but not on us – providing a deep blue-grey canvas for the setting sun.
That night the hyena came visiting again. Seeing unblinking yellow eyes staring at you out of the moonless blackness can be seriously unnerving. But also delightfully real. We were awakened by the usual sounds: the kwerri-kwetchi of a crested francolin, the roar of a lion, the chuckle of a kettle on the fire and the whoop of a hyena. “In three days time,” I thought mournfully, “we’re going to be sitting in an aircraft aching to be back here.”
Next morning, while weaving our way to Dead Tree Island (which we couldn’t get to because the bridge was down), we came across a film crew who said they’d seen lions near the airstrip. We found the lions lazing in the shade after, probably, a busy night of slaughter. Initially there were three healthy lionesses and a playful cub, which they tolerated and hugged until it irritated them. Then they growled and cuffed it into submission. It retreated under a bush to sulk.
…we found the lions lazing in the shade after, probably, a busy night of slaughter.
Lions don’t do much, so after about half an hour of us watching them watch us we went back to camp for brunch. After a snooze, poleaxed by the still, midday heat, we returned to see how the lions were doing. They were still doing nothing, apart from the cub who was still hassling for a game. That night it would undoubtedly be a different story with some bone crunching.
We did a bit of our own crunching: the meal that evening was goat and maize sadza. People claimed they couldn’t eat goat, but it had been stewing in a pot over a fire all day and was delicious. We finished the lot.
That night the hyena brought a friend and they proceeded to snarl viciously at each other over some scraps. The tent fabric felt awfully thin. They also stole our rusks and ate my muesli.
On the final day we boarded a Cessna Caravan and zigzagged over the Delta towards Maun. The vast waterworld below glittered in the early morning sun. Families of elephants – looking like dark almonds from above – moved along paths of their own making, herds of buffalo dotted grassy areas and in deep blue pools hippos wallowed like oversized plums.
Star-patterned waterways radiated through impossibly green reedbeds and circles of palms guarded the perimeters of salt-white islands. It was breathtaking, a river going nowhere and the architect of a wild, outrageous paradise. We landed in Maun with a bump. Was it really over?
Boarding the flight out, I took comfort from a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden:
“I came to see if I could learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I came to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life…”
It somehow reminded me of sadza and goat.
This special adventure for Getaway readers was organised by Safari and Guide services (SGS).
Tel +267-625-1754, e-mail reservations@sgsafrica.com or web www.sgsafrica.com
Who to contact
To book, e-mail getawayadventures@ramsaymedia.co.za with your name and contact details. See www.getaway.co.za/page/getaway-adventures for further itineraries.
What it costs
It costs R9900 a person sharing, starting from Maun. This excludes flights and alcoholic drinks, but includes all other transport, meals and accomadation.NB: Botswana has increased its VAT, so the price may vary.Please enquire when booking.
Getting there
Air Botswana flies from Johannesburg to Maun every day (for fares web www.airbotswana.co.bw). The fastest way to get around the Delta is by light aircraft and the view from above is spectacular. Mack Air employs first-rate bush pilots flying a range of aircraft. We flew back from Moremi to Maun (which is not part of the package) and it cost around R600 per person at the time. For flights and prices, contact Mack Air on +267-686-0675, e-mail reservations@macckair.co.bw or web www.mackair.co.bw. SGS can arrange the charter for you with your booking.
What to take
- It can be cold at night and hot during the day. Take a warm tracksuit to sleep in, as well as a beanie, and a lightweight rainproof jacket.
- Pack using a soft bag and limit weight to under 20kg.
- The sun, especially in the afternoons, bounces of the water onto your face, so take high-factor sunscreen. A neutral coloured umbrella is a clever idea, or at least take a sarong to use as sunshade.
- Boots or comfortable walking shoes are useful for game walks but, at all other times, waterproof sandals are the best footwear.
- There will be plenty of opportunities for photographs, but pack your camera in a dry bag or something that is waterproof.
- Malaria prophylaxis is recommended. Take mosquito repellent cream or spray and cover up mornings and evenings.
by Don Pinnock. This article was written by Don Pinnock, and is featured on ShowMe courtesy of Getaway magazine (July 2010 edition).
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