Music and Drama in the Delta
Trip Start
Feb 24, 2005
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16
21
Trip End
Jul 23, 2005
Okavango Delta,
Botswana
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Our boat cruise left from Namibia, from a campsite just outside Rundu. While there we had the chance to see a local church group sing. I use the term "church" loosely--the building was open in several spots, haphazardly patched together with sheets of tin. But the singing--it's an experience no visitor to Africa should miss. One of my seminal moments in Tanzania was attending church with my host mom in Kimandolu
01_The Okavango River
. After the usual yelling and preaching, the entire congregation started to sing. And instantly, without sheet music or accompianiment, the crowd converged on four-part harmony in a tone that can only be described as transcendent. This group in Rundu almost brought me to tears with the same casual but stunning feat. African music sounds and feels as if every note, every musical phrase, holds within it the history and soul of an entire continent. Africa pours herself out through the music of her people.Rundu was also the jumping-off point for our 3-day tour into the Okavango Delta in Botswana. It was a relief to get to an ecosystem with water, and lots of it. The Delta was at its highest level during our trip, and as luck would have it, the moon was full. We didn't see as much game as in Etosha, but the Delta was so beautiful that we didn't much care. (I can't swear to this, but I think we may have been in the presence of the Apple Snail.) We did see some game, though--you should have seen the chaos that erupted when an elephant went splashing by camp on our first afternoon. I love this group, but I wouldn't trust a single one in a burning building. All we were thinking was elephantelephantelephantelephant, and in our struggle to see it people ran into trees, kicked each other in the face--it wasn't pretty. Finally, though, the uninjured ones (myself included--hey, it's dog-eat-dog out here) got a beautiful view
02_Boat to Angola
. It was a big male elephant splashing through 2 feet of watery Delta, the golden afternoon sun fading onto his back. Not a sight I'm soon to forget.We spent much of our time being poled around in Mokoros, the traditional dugouts of Botswana (though for the environment's sake the tourist canoes are now fiberglass molds). This allowed us to get deeper into the Delta than we could have in motorized boats. It also gave us close-up views of crocs and other game. One day our Mokoros took us to a nearby island for some elephant tracking. We didn't see a single elephant, which perhaps made it all the more thrilling--we heard brush crashing and elephants trumpeting from what seemed like meters away, and it seemed that at any moment one might come crashing out of the brush and straight into our group. One of the women on our trip just spent 6 months in South Africa training to be a game ranger, and even she was nervous about how close we were.
But animal calls can travel quite far, and I tried to remember that the next night when I went to brush my teeth and heard hippos close by. Hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal (mosquitos excluded), so it was a little unnerving that many of our campsites were littered with hippo dung. When I first heard the deep belly-laugh coming from the water's edge, I stage-whispered to my tentmate, "Anne! There's a crazy noise over here, I think it's hippos!" Anne, however, totally unmoved by my imminent trampling, went straight back to brushing her teeth. I backed away slowly (OK, I ran) and steered clear of the water's edge from then on.
The Delta gave us a nice break from the truck, and I loved staying in the more rustic campsites--many of our "camps" have had bars and swimming pools. And there's nothing better than exploring a waterway in something as soundless as a canoe. Botswana is definitely on the re-visit list.
