Dqae Qare Game Reserve Ghanzi

... Botswana without fuss and made our way to a campsite in Ghanzi Botswana. When we arrived we discovered straw covered little huts that we could upgrade to for $10.00. We were excited at first, at the prospect of not having to put up our tents, and at the idea of sleeping on a mattress, but it was so blazing hot that I couldn’t get up the motivation to go and stake them out and claim one ...

... to the tribe to learn about it and to keep the culture going. They all wore tradtional dress of various skins and walked through the bush describing the uses of certain plants.<br><br>One particually interesting one was the dye plant - the tuber once dug from the ground is boiled up and then poured over fresh skins to treat them and colour them brown. It also has another use as a contraceptive. Aparently the juice they make from it, if drunk twice a day ...

... as within a few year's this will be lost ... the handing down of century old customs, which plants and roots to survive off, whch ones to use for medicine, which one has water in it, how to make fire from rubbing 2 sticks. That evening we were entertained to dancing by the villagers. So different to what I had seen anywhere else ...

... sounds in their language live here. My tent mate and I upgraded to a bushmen hut. It is a small hut made out of straw/grasses on a concrete slab with two camping cots and a table....but it has electricity! In the late afternoon, my group met the bushmen people and went on a 2 hour walk through their land. They are small people that all look really old. They wear minimal clothing made from animal skin. They showed us how they find and dig roots for medicine ...

... drama in the shop by dropping her expensive SLR digital camara samshing the lens. Luckily for her it was just the haze filter and not physically the lens or it could have been an expensive moment. I gave up on the shop and left the girls to it and found an old dog outside to entertain me, (he kept pawing me for a scratch which reminded me of Ebby). It was here that Sarah C (Jersey Sarah) read in a bug book about the poisonous nature of the Blister ...

... They mainly do tours inside Namibia, but ours was the "8 Day Delta & Vic Falls" trip. We arrived at the Wild Dog office, had a quick coffee, met our fellow passengers (all 14 of them), a mixed bag of Germans, Dutch, Americans, South Africans, and one Swiss girl and one Israeli guy. I resolved not to let my Israeli traveller-prejudices get the better of me. Then we met our guide, Derek, and his assistant, Erastus, and off we went. Wild Dog use a kind ...

After Okavango we came to Ganzi. Ganzi is on the way to Etosha National Park in Nambia. Here we camped and got to see how the bushmen in this area had once lived. Due to the white man and modern amenities the bushmen people don't live in bush as they once did and their traditions will not last much longer. The bushmen showed how their people had lived for generations. We went around in the bush and dug up various plants and the bushmen explained ...

In the morning we had a hot shower outdoors which despite the bitterness of the morning was absolutely fantastic. We decided to do the other trail and saw more zebra and eland. It was nice to be able to walk around rather than watch everything from your car. Then it was time to leave Motsentsela and on to Ghanzi. The road from Maun to Ghanzi has to be one of the most boring rides and incredibly straight and unfortunately there is ...

After a short drive the next morning we arrived at our next campsite in Ghanzi. The local tribe here are known as the San Bushmen and are famous for their ancient language where most of the sounds they make are clicks instead of speech as we would know it. We went on an hour walk with some of a local tribe where they showed us how they managed to survive in such an ...

Link to the BBC Botswana country profile: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/count ry_profiles/1068674.stm From the BBC website: Botswana, one of Africa's most stable countries, is the continent's longest continuous multi-party democracy. It is relatively free of corruption and has a good human rights record. It is also the world's largest producer of diamonds and the trade has ...