Jade in Botswana

I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but we camped through Botswana. That's right, three of us in a teeeeeny little three-person tent and a car that wasn't much bigger, largely because there aren't as many backpackers in Botswana as in South Africa. Our first night setting up the tent was at the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, where we camped at an actual campsite (not just on the lawn of a backpackers). The tent itself was no problem, once we found a rock to beat the stakes in with. Looking around, though, we realized that though our tent was eminently appropriate to either 1) camping in the actual woods on an actual backpacking trip or 2) setting up on the lawn of a backpackers, we were not nearly as hardcore as the majority of people who set up camp at the adjacent campsites. Most people had SUVs, trailers, rooftop tents, grills and stoves that folded out of their trailers, chairs and tables…basically portable, collapsible houses on wheels. It was a little intimidating.

Still, we did our best. We bought some charcoal and firelighters and built up a fire in the braai area, on which we "cooked" pasta (it never really ended up cooked in the edible sense of the word) and
roasted marshmallows that we are pretty sure were made of asbestos, since they wouldn't catch on fire. The s'mores were delicious, if inauthentic—we replaced graham crackers with tennis biscuits, which I maintain are far better than graham crackers. The Rhino Sanctuary itself was cool—the best part was when a rhino came to drink out of the pool and frolic in the mud made by the sprinklers on the lawn.

Next we headed to Maun. On the way, we had an exciting petrol adventure. We'd certainly heard the warnings that you should fuel up every time you pass a filling station, and let me warn any of you headed to Botswana on a road trip to heed these warnings! Our map had petrol stations marked on it, so as we drove on a back road from Serowe to Maun and passed a filling station with most of our tank still full, we decided to skip it because the map said there was another one in about 60 km. Well, it turned out the map didn't qualify this very well. The filling station was deep inside a village and perpetually out of petrol. The next one was in Maun, quite a ways away. We gamely headed back onto the road to see if we could make it. About 80 km from Maun, our gas light started flickering on and we were pretty sure that gliding into Maun with our remaining fuel was a pipe dream. Fortunately we had just hit the last village before the main highway (there were maybe five or six villages between Maun and Serowe), so we stopped in a tuck shop to ask if anyone knew anyone that could sell us a few liters of petrol. Indeed someone did—a young woman pointed us in the direction of the butchery, where a man who worked there sold us 5 liters of petrol from a jerry can, which we poured into our tank using a cut off cold drink bottle as a funnel. That 5 liters got us just far enough, and at the next filling station we learned the exact price of a full tank of fuel.

In Maun, which we eventually made it to, we signed up for a two-day mokoro (traditional canoe) trip through the Okavango Delta. The delta was very beautiful, and I enjoyed our bush walks in the area. Just as in Khama, I think we won the prize for the least equipment taken on the journey. We fit all of our personal items into one person's backpack, and then also had a shopping bag of food, three sleeping bags, ten liters of water, and a tent—it could have fit in one of the canoes with a full contingent of people. We spent some time watching a hippo, which Becky was convinced would, at any moment, come charging onto shore and kill us. This did not happen.

The next day we went basket weaving. If you go to my photos of this trip (see previous entry) and look at the picture that looks suspiciously like a lopsided button, you will see the fruit of two hours' labor. It's definitely never going to become a basket.

After Maun, we went whitewater rafting. It was the coolest activity of the trip, even better than elephant riding. I managed not to fall out of our raft, though it was a near run thing and I spent a large percentage of our time in the rapids clinging on for dear life. I suppose it's part of the standard safety thing, but the guides definitely made us nervous beforehand as they described the rapids—one supposedly had a ten foot drop, which sounded to me like we were going over a small waterfall (we did not), and they all carried names like "Descent into Hell" and "The Rapid Where You Die" (I don't remember the actual rapid names right now).

We did a game drive through Chobe National Park. Chobe is a major national park in Botswana and has tens of thousands of elephants. How many did we see? Two. They run the game drives in the morning because the likelihood of seeing cats increases, though the odds of that are pretty low in the summertime anyway, even though most elephants and other large game don't come out to frolic in the water until afternoon. Since Chobe is 4wd-accessible only, we weren't able to come back in the afternoon. Still, we saw a dead impala in a tree, and some bok fighting with each other, so there were other consolations to the trip.

Our final major stop was in Nata, where we went to visit the baobabs and the saltpans. The saltpans were pretty extraordinary: suddenly, the savannah stops, and there is a dry, grassless, empty area where the salt has killed everything. During the rainy season, we can't drive out onto it, but even standing on the precipice was amazing.