Down on the Bayou...African Style
Trip Start
Jun 25, 2006
1
46
127
Trip End
Aug 01, 2007
Seronga, Okavango Panhandle,
Botswana
Sunday, November 12, 2006
The Okavango Delta is a huge network of swamps and labyrinthine waterways through forests of marshy papyrus reeds and lily pads that occupies most of central Botswana. It is home to a huge array of wildlife. On our boat ride into the delta we saw giant crocodiles, huge water monitor lizards, and birds galore. Our first night we spent on a large houseboat moored along one of the larger channels. Our time was well occupied with reading, chatting with our fellow passengers and a Connect Four (the Milton Bradley board game) tournament. Needless to say, the British thoroughly dominated the Americans and Canadians!
The next day we were transported by makoro (dugout canoe) to a nearby island camp. Interestingly enough, the "dugout" was actually fiberglass that was shaped and painted to look like a traditional handmade dugout log canoe. Turns out that the government of Botswana was getting concerned that too many ancient trees were being felled to build boats to transport tourists around the delta, so they now require dugouts to be of the more modern variety. Once we arrived at our camp, we spent about three hours being ferried through the delta by local guys poling the canoes through the marsh and also did a walk around a nearby island. Saw an elephant, some hippos and a variety of animal bones lying around. It is a bit disconcerting to be on foot in an area that frequented by lions, I felt a bit like prey! Allegedly the island where our camp is located occasionally has hippos and elephants coming through it.
Big cow in the swamp!
Though we didn't spot either from our tent, the loud grunts and snorts of hippos floated through the air for most of the evening. The variety of bird squawks, chirps, songs and screeches is unbelievably varied although it makes sleeping-in a bit of a challenge. She Said:
Most importantly, we have had two solid nights of sleep and we are finally adjusting to the tent/sleeping bag thing. I would be lying if I said we were roughing it... there are campsites all over southern Africa that cater to overland trucks. The sites have nice pools, a bar with very cold drinks, and private bathrooms with flushing toilets and showers. And most of the places we have been so far have nice little gardens, resident dogs to play with, and even a power source to plug in our computer. I really had this image that we were going to be dirty and have to wait three or four days between showers, but I think we have actually averaged two showers a day because every campsite has even had hot water showers.
Since leaving Vic Falls, we have left the party scene behind and traded it for the nature scene. Instead of loud bass from the bar stereo keeping you up at night, it is the myriad of birds waking you up with the strangest, loudest songs just before dawn. There is one that sounds like R2-D2, or that sounds like a grumpy old man whining, and even one that sounds like it is getting beamed up to the mother ship. One night it there was a stiff breeze going through our tent windows, it was raining lightly and hitting the top of the tent, the crickets were chirping, and you could hear the hippos in the distance.
Sunset on the Okavango Delta
It really seemed like one of those nature sounds cds you could buy to help yourself fall asleep! It was wonderful!!I'm not sure that I can accurately describe how in the middle of nowhere we were in the Okavango Delta... if you need to drop off the map for a while, it is an excellent hiding place!! No one would ever find you, that's for sure. We started with a six hour drive down a straight road with almost no other streets crossing it to get to an out of the way campsite. The next morning, we got in an open safari truck and drove another three hours through nothing to get to a dock where we took a speedboat for another hour and a half to an island, where we met a truck that took us ten miles to the other side of the island to meet dugout canoes to take us to a tiny island campsite. I was a bit stressed on the dugout canoe trip, mostly because we saw so many GIANT crocs from the motorboat on the way to the island. And I heard about the American doctor who was eaten whole by a croc in the Okavango Delta a few months ago right out of a dugout canoe while on his honeymoon!! Oh, and one of the Polers (the canoe "drivers" that push the canoe alone with a long stick/pole) had an extremely long and jagged scar down is entire arm from where he was attacked by a croc, which was a bid disconcerting. As it turns out, we didn't see any crocs from the canoes... just a few hippos (which incidentally kill more people in Africa each year than any other animal) in the water about 100 feet away from us. But the animal that we were the closest two was a huge cow that was up to its head in water grazing... it sure startled us as we came around the corner through the reeds!!
