The Guptas do Botswana

I am sitting on the veranda of my room at Savute Safari Lodge, in the Chobe National Park, and just a few meters in front of me I can count twenty elephants drinking at the water hole, jostling each other for a space at the deepest, cleanest part of the pool. Mom, Dad and Kash have just left for Livingstone and I am waiting for my afternoon flight back to Maun. Holiday time is over, for me at least, and where do I even begin to describe our safari adventures?!
Together, the four of us went to four very different camps—Meno a Kwena for the family to catch a glimpse of what my life has been about for the past 7 months, Jack’s Camp for a taste of the old East African colonial-style safari and the romanticism of the pans, Jao Camp to understand why the lush palm-filled Okavango Delta is referred to as the “jewel of Botswana” and Savute Safari Lodge for up-close and personal (maybe a bit too personal for mom!) wildlife encounters. We did a little bit of everything—quad-biking and sundowners on the pans, a bushman walk during which we learned some of the survival skills of the bushman (how to dig for tubers, snare small birds and make use of various medicinal qualities of plants), powerboat rides zipping through the papyrus-lined channels of the Okavango Delta and flying past hippos, a morning in the mokoros (ie dugout canoes), lazily winding our way down narrow watery channels filled with water lilies and cattail and moving slowly enough to observe the delta’s breathtaking diversity of bird and insect life, and course, lots of game drives. Elephants, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, impala, kudu, tsessebe, waterbuck, lechwe, jackals, ostrich, prides of lions, we pretty much saw it all. Well, we thought we had—until last night, that is...

We had had our last sundowners of the trip together at the expansive Savute Marsh, a beautiful open area that makes it obvious why people who know about Botswana give Savute special reverence. After watching the last of the sun’s rays drop away and the first stars come out, we piled into the cruiser and headed back to the lodge, arriving there at 7ish, a bit later than everyone else. The lodge has a policy of having guides walk their guests back to their rooms once its dark, and so Ofinse, our guide, led the way with the plan to drop Mom and Dad at their room (# 9) and then me and Kash at ours (#10). However, just as we neared Mom and Dad’s room, Ofinse stopped in his tracks and started backing up very slowly. I peered round his shoulder and spotted a leopard under my parents’ veranda—and then two more sets of ears!! A leopard sighting is extremely rare, and to see three at once is just unbelievable! We quickly realized that this was a mother with her two cubs, a potentially very dangerous situation, as mothers are particularly aggressive when they have their babies with them (not surprising!). We all backed up slowly until we felt we were at a safe distance, and then began to take some pictures and quietly observe the beautiful creatures. Ofinse decided it would be best for us to all go to our room, and leave the leopard with her cubs undisturbed, since they were literally under my parents’ veranda. (now comes the exciting part) But, as we are all walking to our room, we realize that the mother has moved, and she is now literally just a couple meters away, underneath the room that is between my parents’ room and my room! We are still on the path, pretty near our room, and now I am quite nervous because I don’t know where her cubs are and whether we are somehow between them and their mother. Ofinse tells us to slowly but quickly (huh?!) walk into our bedroom and shut the door. I lead the way, but as I glance up to our glass sliding doors, I see two cats sitting on the rafters INSIDE our room!! Ahh!! They look like baby leopards to me and now I am very scared. We are stuck between a mother leopard a few meters away and her babies inside the room! What to do?! However, as I loudly whisper to Ofinse, “there are baby leopards jumping around our room!”, he glances over and says, they are just genets, fairly harmless small cats. Ack. Still worried, I open the glass door and they scurry off—but I’m not sure if they went under the bed or out the hole they must have came in?! I decide its best for us all to pile into the bathroom, a separate enclosed area from the bedroom, so I herd the family into the bathroom while Ofinse stays outside, facing off the leopard. To cut a long (but exciting) story short, we spend the next half hour trapped in our bathroom while Ofinse tries to deal with the leopard. Finally, he resorts to blowing the emergency fog horn, and he manages to communicate (ie yell) to the manager that we are trapped in our room and we can’t walk on the pathway back to the main area. A car is sent to get as close to our room as possible, and we are quickly escorted off the steep side of the veranda, under an electric fence, and to the waiting vehicle. A big sigh of relief is taken by all of us as we safely drive to the dining area, where we get to explain to everyone why we are late for dinner. A pretty good excuse, I would say!!
So after an evening an excitement, a change of rooms (Kash and I dont want to sleep in the room with a hole in the ceiling where more animals could crawl through!), and a morning spent watching the now relatively-tame looking elephants, the family has left Botswana for a different kind of excitement (will Kashi do the cliff jump, I am wondering?). I’m headed back to Maun to try and be as productive as possible and get all of my report-writing done in the next month and half. The temptation to get out of Maun and into the bush is strong though, so don’t be surprised to see more wildlife adventure stories posted!

5 Nights in the Kalahari

After having read Mark and Delia Owen’s “Cry of the Kalahari”, there was no way I was going to be able to leave Botswana without a trip into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, located smack dab in the middle of the country and roughly the size of Denmark. The Owen’s account of the seven years they spent studying lions and hyenas in Deception Valley back in the 1970’s—when pretty much no one apart from the indigenous bushman ever ventured into the area—had me captivated with the place even before I arrived. With only two months left, I was getting a bit nervous about making it into the reserve, but by a stroke of luck, I was invited to go along with an old Maun guide (originally an American who did the Peace Corps here 35 years ago and stayed) who was taking some friends from the States on a week long trip into the Central Kalahari bush. The group turned out to be an interesting one—two middle-aged desert ecologists from the Southwest and their kooky wives; Paul and Pam, our american expat guides; and then Matt and I, the “young ones”. Four vehicles in total—only Land Cruisers allowed—with Matt and I bringing up the rear in his newly purchased Hilux (he’s here starting his Phd work on wild dogs). Most of the first day was spent driving through quite thick sand, without many game sightings, but it was made worth it once we arrived at our campsite, Piper Pan. We emerged out of denser bush onto the open pan just as the sun was setting, and were treated to an expansive view of herds of springbok “pronking” (high display jumping), groups of kudu and even some wildebeest. Our campsite was right on the pans, and we quickly set up camp before it got too dark. The rest of the groups had rented roof-top tents, but Matt and I, the budget student travelers, just had our ground tent and bedrolls. Despite feeling a bit inferior at first (our tent was also permanently lopsided and wobbly), it served us just fine—despite jackals running off with the tent bag in the middle of the night!

The next few days were spent going on game drives in the early morning and evenings, resting at our campsite in the heat of the day, and cooking up big delicious dinners. After dinner we sat around the fire, telling stories, talking politics (Batswana and American) and drinking large cups of hot chocolate spiced up with tots of Amarula (much needed in the freezing kalahari winter nights!) Paul had brought his super duper telescope with him and gave us an astronomy lesson one evening, pointing out Saturn with its rings, Jupiter with its moons and hazy red storm in its center, a beautiful cluster of multi-colored stars called the “jewel box” and several other constellations whose names I unfortunately can’t remember.

The trip was incredible, more for just getting a sense of the vastness of the landscape than for anything else. We didn’t see as much game as I had expected—no huge herds of antelope like one hears about in decades past here—but its hard to tell if that was because of an actual decrease of wildlife populations in the reserve or because they had perhaps just moved off into a different part of the CKGR that we never even saw. However we did manage to spot several cheetah, an aardwolf (a rare hyena species), an inquisitive bat-eared fox and a banded cobra, amongst other things! And being with desert ecologists and Paul, who is a wealth of knowledge about Kalahari vegetation, meant I learnt to identify some of the various types of trees and plants a bit better. Not that that is saying very much!

So it was a brilliant week spent in the bush, despite losing a chunk of my big toe to a metal rod while trying to open the exit gate to the Kuke veterinary fence—the same one that was largely responsible for the death of roughly 100,000 wildebeest back in the 80’s and that caused many of the same ecological problems as the Makgadikgadi fence is causing now. Oh, the irony!! It’s like the fence was somehow trying to get me, but only succeeded in making me even more angry with the bloody things...