The Trip of a Lifetime: Part 2 – Chobe Waterfront

     After 2 lovely, memorable days at Vic, we took a taxi to the border crossing of the Zambezi River into Botswana, rode the ferry across, and waited for the guide I'd hired by email, the recommendation of the friend of a Botswana PC volunteer whom we knew from Denver, who had served in Botswana and been a great help to us in getting ready and in understanding the PC.

“This Is Africa” Moment: abandoned?

     I'd made all of the arrangements myself for our 2-week trip, using our limited internet and email, so there was no one local and knowledgeable to help us with the transitions, leaving me always wondering as each new stage approached whether it would work, or had I failed to notice something?

     No one sought us out at the ferry landing where we crossed the Zambezi into Botswana, so we walked up to the border gate, got stamped to enter Bots, but stayed there. Then each of us, one at a time, went back to the ferry. We are pretty recognizable – the only other white people all were in tours, arriving together, being met by those open-back safari vehicles with rows of benches, each vehicle with guides and a driver. No one responded to the name of the guide I'd hired, to whom I'd sent half our payment for 3 nights because, he'd insisted, he had to pay the fee for the campsites right away back in May. An hour passed, now an hour later than we'd said we'd meet. We had no phone service. We spoke to one of the safari guides, who called the number I had for our guide and he answered! He was down by the river, at a separate boat landing where the safaris bring their clients across in a motorboat, maybe 50 yards from the car/truck ferry landing, where we'd come over free with all the Africans.

OK, relax.

TIA Moment: buying food by memory

     Once we'd gone by an ATM to pay much of the other half of what we owed our guide we went to the grocery store where our cook bought all the 4 of us needed for our 3 nights of camping. I saw no list. All from memory. And, you know, if he forgot anything, I never noticed it; do you think sometimes some of the things that assist us, such as lists (and notes for speeches – Swazis never have notes when they speak, but don't seem to need them) cause memory and perhaps other skill,s to atrophy? Though I do wish Swazis made more use of calendars.

Bird of the Day: Saddle-billed Stork

     On our drive into Chobe National Park we saw a Saddle-billed Stork. An enormous bird, maybe 5' tall, with a white belly, black neck and head, and black and white wings. But then, in a touch Disney's animators would not have dared, the bill has broad red and black stripes and, can you believe it, a bright yellow saddle at the base of the bill. Wow! When you take your eyes off it, you can't believe it, and have to look again.

TIA Moment: our car as an elephant scratching tree

     As we drove to our camp we startled a medium-sized female elephant scratching herself against a tree 20 yards away. She appeared annoyed at the interruption and came up to the car and rubbed her ample butt against the right headlight, then her side against the driver's (and my) side of the car. Then she turned towards us and glared, flapping her ears and feeling the car with her truck. Having made her point, she moved on.

I have no pix once the female started scratching herself against the car; photographs seemed unimportant at the time. Here she is when we first encountered her, on the left, scratching her butt against the tree.

      That night we camped on the shores of the Chobe River. Our guide cautioned us that there were lions around, and that hippos, hyenas, or perhaps even leopards could come through the campsite, and all were “Potentially Dangerous Animals” (PDAs, in the guide lingo). Our guide said if we really needed to visit the ablutions during the night, which was a large cinder-block building 75 yards away, we were to call to him to wake him and he would drive us. Well that didn't work for me, but I could hear on and off through the night the distinctive grunting/bellowing/roaring lions make, so I did wait for a time when I had heard no roaring or footsteps for a little while, and I did not go far, nor did I linger, although the stars were magnificent.

TIA Moment: A Lion!

     The next morning, as I was explaining to Katherine that sounds travel further at night, the pitch of a lion's rumble carries particularly well, and the lions we heard were actually probably quite far off, we looked up and watched a large male lion walk by our camp, maybe 20 yards away, between our fire and the river. He's just disappeared off to the left of this picture, in which I had thought I was capturing the coming dawn.

We followed the lion (in the car), and shot lots of pix.

He joined another large male, 3 females and 3 cubs, and then disappeared into the bushes about 300 yards from our camp, following a herd of water buffalo.

TIA Moment: An Attack!

     When we got back to camp we found we'd been raided! No, not by man-eating predators, but by baboons, who had seized the bag containing all our bread – alas, no sandwhiches. Keeping food safe was a struggle.

     Each morning waking up on the Chobe Waterfront was like waking up in the Garden of Eden. “The world was all before them, where to take their rest . . . .” (Martha's Baccalaureate, with an assist from John Milton.) The number of animals and birds was simply astonishing. I tried to count the elephants; there were small families of 30; herds of 80; a herd of around 130. Sometimes 2 such herds would be in sight at the same time. I did not try to count the Cape Buffalo, and could not possibly count the zebra.

During the heat of the day the guides would snooze and I would sit in the shade with a 5-week-old Economist magazine and my siSwati vocabulary flash cards, but I rarely read or studied. Even at the quiet time of day, there was almost always something going on: an Open-billed Stork would catch and swallow a fish, Glossy Ibis and Pied Kingfishers dove for fish, White-breasted Cormorants opened their wings to catch the sun's warmth. When the fishermen from the Namibian side of the river (not a park, as it is in Botswana – Botswana has done a whole lot of things right) moved out of sight in their mokoro (a canoe hollowed from a log),

a Marabou Stork or African Fish Eagle (similar to but slightly bigger than a bald eagle, but with the bright white extending much further down the front) would settle in.

      On our afternoon game drive we found the lions about where we left them, and then followed the males as they walked by our camp as the first male had done that morning; our guide said the females always lead (!), so they must have gone through earlier, unnoticed by us.

      That night around the campfire we discussed with our guide and the cook the importance of tribal relations - whenever they encountered someone they would always mention to us what tribe their visitor was from.

That's our guide in the middle, the cook on the left. And that night and then throughout the rest of the trip we asked about relations between men and women – our guide was adamant that a man should have sex with as many women as possible, and having several wives is a mark of success. Botswana is a relatively prosperous nation with good health care and educational systems, and yet a very high HIV+ incidence, although not as high as Swaziland's, which is the highest in the world. If Bots can't solve that problem, with all it has achieved, the prospects for success in our efforts are not encouraging. Changing behavior is really hard. Especially behavior driven by hormones.

     As our cook was fixing dinner the lions did their parade past the camp; our guide built up the campfire and urged us all to gather closely around it. We complied.

     That night shortly after we'd gone to bed I heard a lot of thrashing around in the river by our campsite, and some trumpeting sounds I thought were elephants, but could have been . . . hippos? When it grew quiet I felt it was probably OK to get up; as I re-entered the tent Katherine awoke and said she wanted to step outside. As she proceeded I heard more thrashing and bellowing from the direction of the water, but Katherine was very cool, giving no indication she'd even noticed. She took longer than I wished, but I said nothing, and we quickly returned to the tent. Her hearing at certain pitches is even worse than mine, and the next morning, when our guide traced the footprints and elephant dung on the road by our camp, Katherine asked if I'd heard them.

That day we finally saw a leopard, only briefly.

Our guide had heard from another guide, one of his “home boys” (his word = same tribe), where a leopard had been seen, and our guide figured just where to park to watch him slowly stalk by, 15 yards away, following a herd of impala. Just magnificent!

Bird of the Day - a Hung Jury: Goliath Heron or Green Wood Hoopoe

      We'd seen the aptly-named Goliath Heron in February at Kruger, but this was such a close and long viewing of a splendid bird that he wins BotD honors.

         (This is Katherine.)  I  disagree with this designation. For me the BotD was the Green Wood Hoopoe, a big green/blue bird with bright red decurved bill and red feet and a high pitched cackling call. Though not a rare bird, this was one I had been hoping to see!

Another TIA Moment: Kidnappers!

     The guide and the cook had different pressure points concerning the dangers around us, although each wanted us in our tent, for different reasons, when they weren't around. I was up a little before dawn the day we were to leave and made my way quickly to the ablutions, for a lot of good reasons. The cook came in shortly after and was genuinely startled and upset to find me there. He had earlier told me that the guide, who had warned us about the lions, had only lead ½ day tours from the lodges, going back each night to the lodge, in contrast to the cook, who was used to living among lions in his 2 week trips; I'd been puzzled about the inconsistency of our jumping in the car to follow the lion, but leaving the cook to fix breakfast while the lions walked by camp; how did we know they weren't hungry? Anyway, the cook's concern was different; he said I was vulnerable to Namibian poachers who, seeing a target of opportunity, might seize a westerner for ransom. But later, when I mentioned that concern to our guide, he brushed it off, saying that hadn't happened for years. Its hard to assess the dangers. Especially in the dark, with lions roaring in the bushes.

      The guide and I had begun to get on each other's nerves. I couldn't consistently distinguish all the different birds we were seeing (K could), and was starting to hear a little too often “As I told you before . . . .” The relationship of a guide with his male client can be fraught: see Hemingway's splendid safari story The Short, Happy Life of Frances Macomber; fortunately, it didn't get that far with us. To my knowledge.

TIA Moment: Elephants on Parade!

Katherine had taken her chair to the shade of some acacia bushes, but came back to where I was sitting to tell me a big herd of elephants was approaching. As we sat under the bushes they passed by 15 yards away from us, some starting as they spotted us, facing us and waving their ears, stamping a little before they turned and moved on to the river. I stopped counting at 80.

Here are some other shots from Chobe. It was just unbelievably fabulous.