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...