The Trip of a Lifetime: Part 4 – Maun, Old Bridge Bacpackers

     Arriving in the dusty tourist and agricultural town of Maun after the luxury of Gunn's Camp was a big change. A van met the plane, picked us up with our luggage, drove us to the terminal, and we walked away, with our backpacks, on our own again.

TIA Moment: No cash!

    We always had to be careful to get cash whenever we passed an ATM, especially in a new country. We'd been in Bots nearly a week, but only passed an ATM twice, each time hitting it for our withdrawal limit, so we really needed to re-supply in Maun. There was an ATM right outside the airport. I fed in my card and PIN, and the screen went blank. Hmmm. Katherine tried hers. Same. We started trying to figure how far we could get on the cash we had left, plus credit cards where they might be accepted. We walked a little further, spotted another ATM, and, ah, the sweet sound of those little wheels inside spinning out Motswani Pula. We knew it was the last Saturday of the month, and we'd seen a similar pattern in Swaziland, where some ATMs run out of cash the weekend after pay-day.

    In Maun we stayed at a backpackers hostel PCVs recommend, but we got the upscale tent-on-a-platform overlooking the Thamalakane River, which drains the east side of the Delta, with ensuite open-to-the-stars HOT showers and potty. Although the ablutions at Chobe Waterfront had an impressive-looking solar apparatus, Katherine got 1 sort-of warmish shower while we were there, and the boys' never warmed up at all; we showered quickly, in the hottest part of the day. And Gunn's, despite the wine glasses, white table cloths and fluffy towels, didn't really have hot water for its showers. So after a week of cold showers, the hot showers at the backpackers in Maun, for which we paid 1/10^th of the daily cost of Chobe camping and 1/40^th of the Gunn's cost, were quite welcome.

     In Maun we did an all-day mokoro ride, a morning bird walk/mokoro ride, and a hot dusty trip into town looking for the fabric we'd seen on women at Vic, but the fabric in Maun was essentially what we see in Swaziland; the Central African women must have a source we haven't discovered yet.

BotD: African Barred Owlet

     Our bird guide in Maun had a really sharp eye but no binoculars, and few teeth on the left side of his mouth. As we walked through a grove he stopped and pointed, and then carefully described where to look. Neither of us saw, with “binos” as they're called, what he was seeing with his bare eyes, and the bird flew. He called it, spotted where it returned to, and painstakingly guided our searching, until we, with our binos, spotted a perfectly splendid little brown owl, with white-speckled circular patterns around its eyes and over its head, white-fringed feathers on its body, and then large white spots like epaulets on its shoulders.

Oh yeah! It's hard to spot many raptors, and owls are especially difficult.

TIA Moment: “May I borrow me your binos?”

     Our guides on the all-day mokoro trip were Whiz (named, he said, for an American singer; could have fooled me.) and Extra (we did not ask the derivation of the name; the names of many Swazi children reflect the circumstances of their birth – the name of the PC/SZ Manager of Safety and Security (a full time position and, for some of these small young women in remote sites, he's very important) translates as “another boy”). Neither had binos, and shortly into our walk Extra, who seemed to be sort of a guide-in-training, asked could he “borrow me your binos” (a turn of phrase also common among the Swazis, whose language has only one word thata means both lend and borrow.) Then he asked for the small bird book Katherine was carrying. He did not offer to return them, and seemed to expect to walk with them during our excursion. We got them back and borrowed them to him when he asked.

BotD: Pied Kingfisher

(with an honorable mention to 6 Little Bee-eaters)

     We saw Pied Kingfishers all through Bots, but they are still special, with vivid black-and-white markings and a ridiculously long bill; hyper-active, darting/hovering/returning to perch and then diving for small fish. But at the backpackers at Maun a family of 2 seemed to have nested in the bank 1' under our tent platform and spent all day fishing (successfully, then bringing their catch back to the vines in front of our chairs and gulping the little guys down like nachos at a Super Bowl party – alas, that would have been the best part of the last SB I got up at 1 PM to watch in February).

They're noisy: K - “I never thought I'd ever say 'oh, just another kingfisher!'”

     In the colorful world of Bee-eaters, Little Bee-eaters are the (relatively) drab poor relations, with only a yellow throat and green back to show for themselves, neither terribly bright. But one evening at our Maun backpackers 2 perched on a slender twig 10' from our porch, then 2 more, with the twig bobbing up and down as each landed, then another and another until there were 6 of them, huddled together in the fading light as if for warmth.

    We went on the all-day mokoro ride, and then had dinner with a young German couple who were traveling southern Africa by public transportation. They were in the tent next to ours. He'll start at PWC in audit in Cologne in October.

We bought them an excellent Namibian beer (Windhoek – Namibia was colonized by Germans) and asked them about how people from the old East Germany are regarded by those from West Germany; with tribalism at the root of so much discord on this continent, I'm curious about how some groups get along, others don't.

     We cooked 2 nights in the communal kitchen with 2 South African couples about our age who were driving 4,000 miles around southern Africa. The wives were sisters, raised on a remote farm without electricity at the base of the Drakensberg Mountains in the eastern part of SA. The girls had gone away to boarding school at age seven – 3-month terms with a single visit home per term. The 2 couples came over to our porch for cocktails

and explained SA to us: those of English and Afrikaans descent barely notice the origins of each, this despite some English concentration-camp atrocities just over 100 years ago during the 2^nd Boer War and English opposition to the Afrikaans' imposition of apartheid more recently. One husband is of English descent, the other Afrikaans. In the deep south of the US I think some are still fighting the Civil War, 150 years later – how's that work? Relations among whites, blacks and, I suppose, coloreds, in SA are still developing, but are far better than they would have been without Nelson Mandela; what a precious gift that man was for this entire region.

     And then, alas, a flight back to Jozie, overnight at a hostel there, and early the next morning the Gautrain into town to the international khumbi rank

 

followed by a 5 hour ride to Manzini and 1 hour back to our town, some grocery shopping and a ½ hour walk home, heavily loaded, including with many wonderful memories.