One Month in Namibia

Well, and a little in Botswana, too. But that would've made the title too long.

It's been forever since I've posted! I've had good reason, though: never in my life have I been in such remote places as I've been for the last month. There's no way I'll get it all down here, but I'll try, starting with our five days in Botswana.

We ended up arranging the dugout canoe trip through the Okavango Delta in northwestern Botswana. My Lonely Planet (which is surprisingly useless in this part of the world) says that it's the world's only inland delta, which makes sense, as the idea of a great river just sort of petering out in the middle of a continent instead of veering off towards an ocean is indeed strange.

To arrange a delta trip, we had to travel from Gaborone to the northern town of Maun on the 6am bus. Our taxi driver, who we'd called the night before, was quite late picking us up, and by the time we arrived at the station our bus was already packed full. Luckily, though, there's rarely such a thing as an African bus that can't be persuaded to fit one more, and so Justin and I and our bags and twenty other people ended up standing in the aisle. Having no idea how far away Maun was, we hoped we wouldn't be standing long; perhaps we'd even arrive in Maun after only a hour or two. After maybe half an hour of standing, I asked a man what time we were expected to arrive; had we not been packed in so tightly I might have fallen over when he said four o'clock in the afternoon.

Luckily, people were getting on and off at various stops along the way, and Justin and I progressed down the line of standees in a surprisingly orderly fashion, finally claiming seats after about three hours. We ended up sitting apart, and my seatmate, fortuitously, just happened to be a tour guide. I got his number, and he turned out to be instrumental in helping us arrange our boat trip the next day.

We skirted the Kalahari all the way to Maun, and I watched out the window with fascination as the reddish dust of Gaborone turned to the grayish-white powder of the north. We saw herds of cows, goats, and donkeys out the windows, guided through the dry bush by cowboys on horseback. We saw little villages of rondavels--cylindrical mud huts with pointed thatched roofs--sitting together with their faces to the road and their backs to the great gray Kalahari. And we saw, on the bus and on the roadside, groups of women from the Herero tribe, dressed in their ground-length, ruffled, Victorian-style dresses and foot-long sideways hats designed to resemble the longhorned cattle that their people herd. (The tour guide, Issa, told me that they'd taken their style of dress from the colonial ladies--obviously a century or two ago. And Justin remarked, not unkindly, that they looked like they had stretched coat hangers over their heads.)

But mostly, I saw nothing out the window--the vast nothingness of the bush, beautiful in its emptiness, and the whole reason I'd dreamed of coming to southern Africa. And as dusk approached, our bus surrendered us to the little town of Maun.

Maun (pronounced with two syllables: Ma-oon) turned out to be a really pleasant, funny little place. Donkey carts carrying loads of goods and people trotted along the side of the road, pulling through sand as deep as you'd find on a beach. We camped at a fantastic little place about 20 minutes out of town by minibus, a gorgeous spot literally yards from the banks of the Okavango River. (They told us, at least, that a fence had been installed upriver to keep the crocodiles away, and we luckily saw no evidence to disprove this.) The sunsets from that campground, which faced west over the river, were some of the most vibrant I've ever seen, with pinks and golds so unbelievably bright that they looked painted onto the sky.

An afternoon's walk was more than enough time to see all of Maun, which consisted of a few chain supermarkets and gas stations, rows of tin shacks selling candy and haircuts and rechargable phone cards, and a dozen or so delta tour operators. We got the phone number of a mokoro poler from some other campers and called him directly, rather than going through a company. (A mokoro is a wooden dugout canoe, the traditional, and still most efficient, means of transport through the delta when it's flooded. The boatman--or poler--stands at the back of the canoe and propels it by means of a very long stick that he pushes against the riverbed, which is never more than nine or so feet below the boat.)

We called our potential poler, Sim, and arranged for him to meet us at our campground to negotiate a trip; when he arrived, we were surprised to see that the translator he'd brought along was none other than Issa, my seatmate on the bus from the previous day! And after a slightly awkward but relatively smooth bargaining session, we had booked ourselves on a 3-day, 2-night trip through the delta leaving the next morning.

Issa arrived in a giant 4-wheel drive safari vehicle the next morning to transport us to the "mokoro station," a twenty foot-long stretch of open riverbed down a long sand path at which a dozen or so canoes were stored. Justin and I were in the back of the open-sided, canvas-topped vehicle, and though Issa was by far the sanest driver I've seen in all of Africa, I still got clocked on the head by a tree branch when the road narrowed. After a few more close calls, I gave up and sat on the floor in the middle of the back, safe from the branches that continued to scrape threateningly against the canvas top and poke through the open sides.

When we finally got to the "station," Sim was waiting there for us. We all got into the boat with our bags--Justin in the pointed nose, leaning up against his backpack, me behind him, with my backpack behind me, and Sim standing at the pointed rear with his small bag at his feet.

Sim had outfitted his mokoro with a tall stick on the nose. At first, I thought it was some sort of personalizing marker--that perhaps we should hang a pirate flag from it or something--but as the open waters of the station changed into the closed-in, reed-choked delta, we saw the cleverness of his set-up. Away from the main channel, the delta is only seasonally flooded; in these places, the grass grows out of the water as thickly as it would grow on land. In many places the grass stretched far over our heads as we sat in the bottom of the boat, ourselves only inches off the water; all we could see was the mokoro's nose breaking through the thickets in front of us, as if we were canoeing across a prairie. Sim's ingenious stick arrangement caught some of the spiderwebs that we broke through, soon becoming so wrapped in silk that it looked silver in the harsh sunlight. It couldn't possibly catch them all, though, and we were soon absolutely covered in webs, water spiders, and gnats that flew up our noses and into our ears and eyes. It was disconcerting at first, but I finally just had to give up trying to get them off, only looking down once a minute or so to check for the truly big spiders that occasionally found themselves on our vessel.

The water was pristine, and in places where the grass wasn't so thick, I could see all the way to the bottom of the delta. The ground under the water looked like no riverbed I've ever seen. It looked just like dry land, except submerged; very terrestrial-looking grass and even flowers sat motionlessly underwater, sunken garderns calmly waiting for the annual dry-out. The water was so clear and the ground under it so resembled a grassland that the canoe seemed suspended in the air, floating silently over an eerily still prairie.

We traveled for about three hours that first day, landing at a muddy little island that Sim, who actually spoke quite decent English, said was called "Kudu Horn Island". He told us that there were elephants somewhere on our (very small) island and that we might hear them shaking the fruits out of trees at night, but that we shouldn't worry, as elephants don't like to crash tents. We never saw or heard much wildlife on our island, though, and never explored very much of it, either; aside from the twenty or so square yards where we put up our tents, the rest of the island appeared to be impassably thick with vegetation. We couldn't see more than a few yards over the bush, and never ventured out into it, nor did Sim mention any more about what was out there.

We put up our tents there and made lunch (as part of our bargain, Justin and I had agreed to provide Sim's food) while Sim built a campfire and boiled a pot of tea. After lunch, Sim encouraged us to take the mokoro out by ourselves, and we found how truly difficult it is to propel the boat through tall grass. We were only gone about 20 minutes, and were content to leave the poling to Sim after that.

Later that evening, Sim poled us over to a larger island called Chief's Island, a spot of land about 4 km square and housing lions, elephants, hippos, all sorts of antelope, and plenty of other creatures you'd never expect to find on an island. We landed the boat and walked around the island, which was mainly a dry grassland (in the midst of all that water!) and was crisscrossed by footpaths worn in by animals and mokoro tourists alike. We returned to Chief's Island and other nearby islands several times over our two and a half days in the delta, but never saw too much in the way of wildlife. We saw several elephants (luckily all from a distance, as they can be quite dangerous and Sim loped along shockingly unarmed), even watching a few of them crashing through the shallows. We also heard plenty of enormous shaking and crashing noises as they shook palm trees with their trunks, and saw dozens of broken trees as evidence of this practice. We also saw hippos from the safety of our boat (they're even more dangerous than elephants), and watched dozens of water antelopes running and leaping through the shallow water as well.

Internet time is almost up, and I have so much more to tell! More soon--heading to southern Namibia by train tonight!