Botswana to Namibia

I'm on the second hour of a 20-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur, and this airport has free internet kiosks (hooray!), so I think I can afford to kill some time...

NB: I think searching on Flickr for "wondergerbil at yahoo dot com" (the real address, that is) under the tab that says "People" might work.


Back to the delta in Botswana:

On one of our walks around Chief's Island, we tracked a lion by its footprints for a long way, which was both scary and awesome; I had a hard time deciding whether or not I actually wanted to find what we were looking for. We didn't end up seeing it, though, giving up after about half an hour. Sim told us afterwards that it must have been a male lion we were following; when we asked how he knew, he casually responded that a female lion would have turned around to fight us by then. Seems like he should develop a system for determining a lion's sex before beginning to track it, in that case...

Our two and a half days on the delta were overall very, very quiet. At night Sim would build us a fire around which we'd all cook and eat in somewhat awkward silence. He wasn't much of a talker, responding to most questions with a single word, and I felt rude talking to Justin in front of him, so we all remained largely mute. Sim's biggest contribution to conversation came on the first night when, after about an hour and a half of no one talking, he abruptly asked us if Jackie Chan was still alive and living in America. We confirmed that yes, as far as we know this is the case; Sim nodded thoughtfully and, thus satisfied, got up and went into his tent with hardly another word. The silence was sometimes quiet nice, though--nights on our little island were the darkest I've ever seen, and it was enough just to marvel at the billions of blazing stars.

On the third afternoon, Sim poled us back to the mokoro station, and we readied ourselves to head to Windhoek, Namibia's capital, the next day.

Windhoek, however, didn't happen the next day, or even the day after that. Turns out it's really hard to get from northern Botswana to Namibia. The day after returning from our delta trip, we caught a rickety old Chinese cast-off bus from Maun to the town of Ghanzi, about two hours east of the Namibian border. We'd been told that we'd be able to find our way into Namibia from there, and as the trip lasted only a few hours, we were hopeful we'd even be able to find a bus that same afternoon.

The fact that the Ghanzi "bus station" was a tree should have been our first clue that it wasn't going to happen. When we alighted from our bus and asked the few people loitering around the tree about getting to Namibia, they all mentioned a bus the next afternoon to some place called Charles Hill, which was still in Botswana but apparently closer to the border; they resolutely dismissed the notion that we might find our way there that same evening. We therefore pitched our little orange tent (which we'd fondly taken to calling "The Pumpkin") on the grounds of a hotel and passed a very pleasant evening with a friendly South African family who shared their dinner with us.

By 11am the next day we'd returned to the tree station to await our bus. We waited for several hours in the Botswana winter weather, unlike any I've felt outside southern Africa: blisteringly hot in the sun, but actually quite unpleasantly chilly in the shade. The air is so dry that the sun, as intense as it is, can't heat it.

The bus, a short, squarish contraption with more Chinese characters in the window, arrived around 1pm. As it neared the tree, I was surprised to see everyone waiting there jump up; as it slowed to a stop, people began running at it. I wasn't sure what was going on, but doing the same as those around me seemed like the best plan, so I started running too.

We might have made it if I hadn't gotten my head stuck to a tree branch. A branch from that same merciless acacia under which we'd been sitting for hours got completely, irreparably tangled in my hair. Yanking as hard as I could didn't even release it. By the time Justin had freed me, the bus had been mobbed by a crowd twice its capacity. People were shoving and jostling to get in the door; some hooligan young men were boosting each other through the back windows. Unwilling to be left out, I followed the example of the old lady in front of me and began stuffing my bag through the driver's window, but to my genuine amazement he stopped me, saying it was full. (Pretty much the only time anywhere in Africa I've ever heard a bus driver say that.) He also curtly told me that there was no other bus to Charles Hill that day, and then went back to wrangling the crush of people behind him.

We ended up hitchhiking across the border that night. An old man who was also unable to get on the bus showed us the designated hitchhiking spot; it was a remarkably organized system, no doubt due to the gaps in the public transportation system like the one we'd just witnessed. Most of the people at the hitching post were, in fact, other would-be bus riders from the tree station.

For the first couple hours we rode in the back of a pickup truck with five other people--seven total in the back, plus everyone's luggage. What a spectacle we must have been: four dozing African men, one older Herero lady in full traditional dress and headgear, and we two Americans. With my Western paranoia against touching or encroaching upon the space of any stranger, I struggled to find a comfortable position at first; the Herero lady, luckily having no such compunctions, solved the problem by shooting her hand out, grabbing my foot, and jamming it into an open spot just next to her own. And so we rode on, a motley band of hitchhikers, for most of the afternoon.

We turned at a road sign that read, simply, "Namibia", with an arrow pointing towards the empty westward expanse, and I watched as mirages turned the horizon behind our truck into pools of water that followed us across the desert. The drivers of the truck took us as far as they could, and at dusk we found ourselves again waiting for a lift with one other hitchhiker on a prodigiously lonely stretch of road. A few cars passed without stopping, and just as we were wondering what a night spent on the side of the Trans-Kalahari Highway might be like, a truck driver pulling a load of new cars stopped and picked up all three of us.

With the four of us in the cab of the truck, we drove on through the night, crossing the Namibian border and stopping about an hour later at a little eastern town called Gobabis. The ride was mostly quiet, the only excitement coming when I saw an anteater for the first time--excitement that was quickly quashed, along with the anteater itself, a second later as it ran in front of the truck and the helpless driver hit it.

The driver dropped Justin and me at a hostel down a narrow dirt road in Gobabis. We told him he didn't need to drive us all the way down the little road, but maybe we should've been more insistant, as after letting us out, he ran over the hostel's gate--completely over it, flattening it--while Justin and I sneaked away and made mental notes to hide if we saw him in town the next day.

But we didn't, and the next afternoon, on our third day of travel since leaving Maun, we found a shared taxi from Gobabis to Windhoek, and by that evening, we'd finally made it to the rather unimposing Namibian capital. From there we had only to plan our three-week trip around the country--a trip which turned out to be the biggest adventure we had in all our travels.

Northward Bound

South Africa is now behind us.

As I stated briefly in my last post (in which everything I stated was brief), our final days in that country were spent in Johannesburg, great colossus of the South. While not even the capital of its home nation, the city could nevertheless in some ways be considered the capital of the entire continent. I read that something like 10% (or was it more?) of all the commercial activity of Africa--all of Africa--is conducted in Johannesburg. My first impression of the city was one of intimidation (fear, even); this was followed by frustration; and finally, I felt a small amount of appreciation and even a spark of interest. I can't say it's a place I'm terribly excited about returning to (even though I'll have to, as I'm flying out of there in August to head to Indonesia), but it has also garnered some of my respect.

We had to connect in Joburg to get from Nelspruit (in the far northeast of the country, where we had gone to see Kruger National Park) to Gaborone (capital of Botswana, just over its southeastern border with South Africa.) We were planning on waiting out our nine hour between-bus layover entirely in the Joburg bus station, and nearly made it all the way through without incident. As we were collecting our belongings and preparing to board our bus to Botswana, though, I saw that my passport (along with every single other valuable thing I had with me, with the exception of one credit card and a wad of American dollars I'd hidden among my toiletries) was gone. Good thing I noticed it before we got on the bus; I can't imagine what would have happened if I hadn't noticed that my passport was gone until we got to the Botswana border.

While I mourned the loss of my cameras and the thousand or so photos they contained--the entirety of our past month in pictures--Justin called for backup. He had (very, very luckily) been given the phone number of a friend of a friend who was working in Joburg for the summer. He called her up, explained the pickle we were in, and she couldn't possibly have been more helpful--she sent her driver straight to the bus station to get us, and then called the (fantastically fancy) hotel that was putting her company up for the summer, and simply said they had two more "employees" arriving and needed another room charged to the company account. And that was it.

We checked into the hotel, one which we never could have afforded on our own, and immediately drank all the free packets of coffee and hot chocolate in the room, swiped all the mini soaps and shampoos, and began salivating at the thought of continental breakfast (which, by the way, was AMAZING). While getting robbed sucks, at least she helped us do it in style. Many, many thanks to her, a truly generous friend--one of many we've met this trip.

While in some ways South Africa provided me with my most unfortunate travel experiences yet, in other ways, it granted me some of the most affirming ones. We met stranger after stranger who helped us with complete selflessness. Without all these passing kindnesses, we wouldn't have made it across the country nearly so easily, and for them I am abundantly grateful.

But like I said, South Africa is now behind us, and we are covered in the sand and dust of its less-imposing northerly neighbor. We arrived in Gaborone on Tuesday night, and I was expecting the sort of less-developed African city I've experienced elsewhere--crowded, loud, mobbed with people and goats and hawkers and overflowing with a sort of chaos that's both welcoming and unsettling. But in Gaborone, I found little of that. It was dusty, yes, but surprisingly peaceful and orderly, with taxi drivers that actually took no for an answer and street vendors that didn't pop out from behind their wares to follow me down the street or grab my arm. Justin even got surprisingly few shouts of "Konnichiwa!" and "Hey, Jackie Chan!".

We spent one day walking around Gaborone, visiting the eclectic and somewhat moth-eaten (but free!) museum and waiting in interminable lines at every bank in town trying to get my finances sorted out. We also ate some of the best street food we've had yet: a plate piled high with pap (the cornmeal paste), beef, and cabbage for under $2.

The next morning we took the 6am bus and headed to the far northwest of the country to see the legendary Okavango Delta, the vast and impassable floodplain of the Great Rift Valley, from where I am now writing this. We're trying to get a trip in a dugout canoe arranged, starting tomorrow--and perhaps, if we can make it far enough north by boat, we can try to get straight to Namibia from there. More updates soon!!