Safari

So last week our program went on a week long safari trip. It was supposed to be over the semester break, but as the break was cancelled due to the strike, we had to miss school in order to go (but we weren’t going to cancel the trip since all of us had already paid).

So we left Botswana on Sunday and had a flight to Maun. Maun is a small northern city in Botswana and is pretty much the closest you can get to many safari destinations by plane. Just outside Maun is Audi Camp, the lodge that arranged all of our safaris and trips. On Monday we headed out for the Central Kalahari in a gigantic jeep type vehicle with a trailer, a cook named Benjamin, and our guide named Rasta. The entire trip was 9 ½ hours long. We stopped for lunch under a tree for lunch and Rasta checked the bushes for black mambas before we sat in the sand to eat our chicken/coleslaw/peanut butter feast.

The Central Kalahari was awesome. We stayed at a campsite with a latrine and bucket shower, but no water. We had to bring all of our water in from Audi Camp in the trailer. The first day we saw a giraffe, gemsbok, springbok, steenbok (sp?), red hartebeest, and a female lion. That night we heard lions near our camp so Rasta had us jump in the safari jeep and we went out searching for them. Rasta’s innate hearing allowed us to eventually find them. It was a very exciting night that we spent speeding down the trails (and off the trails) glimpsing two male lions in the headlights, then losing them, trying to figure out where they would go, and catching site of them again.

That night Rasta warned us: “If you use the bathroom in the night, make sure you shine your light in all the bushes, not fast like this, slow, slow, and then take one step, and then shine again. If you see eyes, no screaming, just call for me ‘Rasta, Rasta,’ I don’t want to hear screaming. It might be a lion or hyena.” After that obviously no one wanted to use the bathroom in the night.

The second day (Tuesday) we saw a cheetah and more of the same antelope. That day I also got very sick on the morning game drive. I was sick the rest of the day and missed the second game drive and had to go to the bathroom every half hour. It may have been food poisoning or something. The worst part was that I was still sick at night and I had to head to the bathroom in the dark at midnight. I shined my light on all the bushes. I took a step. I shined my light. I took another step. Then I couldn’t stand it and ran to the bathroom. While in the latrine I kept thinking “the lion’s are circling, the lion’s can smell me and are going to eat me when I come out.” It was most terrifying.

Luckily I felt much better the next day, and we packed up and drove six hours to the Nxai pans where we saw abundant zebra, giraffes and a couple elephants. In fact one elephant trumpeted at us and started waving its ears. We all gripped our seats sure it would charge us. Rasta laughed* and said, “hahaha, he says, ‘get away here, get away here’” but Rasta seemed in no hurry to oblige the elephant’s request. At Nxai pan they had real bathrooms, which was a nice change, but they were surrounded by spikes, which apparently were to dissuade the elephants from crushing them, which made me uneasy.

The next day (Thursday) we headed back to Audi Camp and spent one day there luxuriating in the restaurant food before shipping out to the Okavango Delta on Friday morning. At the Delta we loaded all of our gear into makoro boats and were makoroed (maybe it can be a verb too?) for a couple of hours to our campsite. The makoros are little canoe-like boats that are poled by local makoro boat drivers like a gondola. We didn’t see any animals. In fact we fairly baked in the sun. It was all I could do to keep on the long safari shirt and pants (don’t want to burn!) and stop myself from jumping in the abundant water (don’t want parasites!). But it was beautiful, there were lots of birds and pretty water lilies all over.

Our campsite was even more primitive than in the Okavango. We didn’t even have a pit latrine, only a hole in the ground behind some bushes. We also had an amazing neighbor (maybe Australian or South Africa, I couldn’t tell) who had pitched his tent across the stream from us. He was swimming in the water as we arrived (perhaps naked, we didn’t look long enough to discern) and came up to our boat asking how many beers we would give him if he tipped over our boat. Then he apparently asked Todd if he could buy us from him. As we got further we kept hearing him mutter “Americans” under his breath.

That day we went on a “bush hike” with our guide, named Eliah. But we didn’t see any animals and it started to poor rain on us, so we all got uncomfortably wet, cold and covered in burrs. The next day we just chilled at the campsite until packing up and heading back to the safari jeep on the makoros.

The ride back to Audi Camp from the mokoro boat landing is about 1 hour long, and 50 minutes into our departure, Todd noticed his wallet was missing. We had to turn around and drive the 50 minutes back, scanning the road the whole way. Apparently he had wrapped the wallet in a white plastic bag for waterproofing and so it was cleverly disguised as every other piece of litter on the road. We finally found the correct bag on the side of the road right by the mokoro boat landing, but the wallet was absent. So we decided someone found it, stole the wallet and tossed the bag. So the driver took us into the nearest village. All of the men in the village ran up to us as soon as the safari vehicle arrived and the driver passive aggressively accused them of stealing the wallet. The headman was really pissed and said it needed to be returned and glared at everyone. They all enthusiastically jumped into action in a version of Okavango CSI: whacking the bushes with sticks, looking at the footprints and comparing them to their neighbor's shoes, pointing at lines of site, examining the plastic bag. It was a pretty interesting cultural experience. Unfortunately Todd never got his wallet back. Later Todd said Ore (one of the mokoro polers) had seemed guilty and had hung back from the situation, and Jordan attested that he had “shifty eyes,” although then Emilie pointed out that perhaps he always has shifty eyes. I guess we will never know.

The next two days we spent at Audi reading, internetting, and eating. However, Monday morning we went to a cultural village down the road where people actually live in the traditional manner. We were shown cooking, traditional medicines, traditional music, basket weaving, and told about the marriage ceremony and the building of huts. We even tried pounding sorghum and carrying a pitcher on our head. Both were difficult. All of us loaded up with baskets at the little store adjacent, it seemed more appealing since we knew the people who made them.

That afternoon we headed back to Gaborone, and now I am back at school and looking forward to two tests this week and an ethnographic interview. Sigh.

Sorry for the obscene length of this post.

*Rasta laughs just like Jabba the Hut, no joke. He also has a giant scar across his face from when he got in a rumble with a leopard. In general he is pretty badass.