Botswana: no fences

To get to Botswana we were going to have to drive across the Mohembo game reserve which we had previously visited to see their giant Baobab tree.  We came across a group of baboons, some of whom had babies clutched to them at the side of the road. 

Troop of baboons with babies

We also stopped to photograph a single adolescent bull elephant who was crossing the road ahead of us.  I took a photograph of our friend's vehicle as they were stopped with the elephant ahead of us.

Elephant crossing

This trip was a little fraught with concerns on my part.  We had handled the roads in Namibia well.  On the whole these roads are well maintained dirt roads, often with corrugations and sometimes with ruts or sudden dips.  In Botswana we had been warned there are roads with deep sand and sometimes river crossings. 

Added to this was no clear indication if we could get mobile data for maps there.  I had prepared by downloading google maps to cover our entire trip but we had already learned that while this may place you in a location and on a road, the directions mapping was not reliable. 

The border crossing was easy, although it included a health screening for ebola.  There has been no ebola in this region but they are making sure that they catch someone who is sick before they enter the county.  So the health check was not much more than a casual visual check and a temperature check.

At the gate the official confiscated our firewood and told us no fresh food or meat was allowed to cross.  Three out of four of us are vegetarian so there was no meat in our little camping fridges but we  had the option to discard, cook or eat the vegetables in the fridge.

Our friend who had so far been cooking amazing meals (we were a one day on, one day off rotation between the couples) cut up all the vegetables and we boiled them for about 5 min while we ate apples. We were then allowed to cross with that which that night became our vegetable stew supper. 

Our first stop was at an island in the Okavango Delta called Guma Lodge.  The website warns that this is a 4x4 only road and strongly advises visitors uncertain of their vehicles capabilities to call ahead and arrange to be picked up and ferried to the lodge.  We had booked a river-facing campsite so we had no option but to take the road.

The WhatsApp message from the host simply read, go to Etsha 13 and follow the signs from there.   Now, in the luxury of our home in Portugal I was able to find out that the Angolan refugees that settled there in 1969 were put into locations called Settlements - each with a number associated.  A local official decided to rename them and used a Khwe word (San Bushman of this region) which means pool of water and this naming convention stuck.

Guma lodge road - photo by Anne

Google was able to map directions for us to Etsha 13 and when we got there we saw rough signs pointing at a 2-wheel dirt track with deep fine sand - finer than sea sand.

After a very bumpy ride with deep wide corrugations that were sometimes alternating so that you felt you were in a rocking boat without the gentleness that water brings to the experience, we came to our first river crossing. 

There were several of these - in some cases the path ahead was signaled by poles stuck into the water, some of which described a sharp right turn in the middle of the river or by sandbags that had been put down to raise the level of the road.  We didn't realize how deep one of them was until I saw our friend's rear left tailgate dip into the river as they took the right turn.

Our rental company had warned me that we should not go through deep water and I had no idea how deep that meant but we had no choice at this point and so we went for it.

Towards the end of the road we were wondering how much more we'd have to endure the rocking and bumping and then suddenly we were on a more level, less sandy road alongside an open area where a helicopter was parked.

Guma lodge helipad

The lodge is very impressive and we were given a campsite right next to the river with a dedicated ablution block.  

This was the third location we had visited that had no barriers between the water and the campsite and there were warnings to be on the lookout for hippo and crocodiles but we had grown accustomed to the burbles from hippos near us and I reassured myself that a crocodile could not come close without being noticeable because of how shallow the water was within a few meters of the edge of the campsite. 

Guma lodge campsite private view 

On offer was a Mokoro boat trip and helicopter tours of the Okavango.  The location is pretty famous for fishing and there were motor boats to take people out fishing and a large barge that you can go onto the lagoon overnight.  We opted for the Mokoro boat trip.

We were up early, leaving just after sunrise.  The two guides were impressive.  They had vast knowledge of the area and of the animal behaviour there.  They explained how the hippos made these channels between the islands as they made there way back and forth each day to the deep water in the morning and the shallows in the evening.  Our trip was timed to begin after the hippos had left the shallows at 7:30am.

We started off in a power boat which dropped us off at a landing on one of the islands in the lagoon where we were given some brief safety instructions. 

The Mokoros were originally made from hollowed out trees but are now being made from fiberglass which lasts longer than the wooden boats did.   They are powered by a man standing in the bow with a long pole that has a forked end.   

Our friends in the Mokoro boat

Our guide explained that the end is to catch on the floating papyrus and hippo grass, much like a wading bird's foot.  Because of the silent approach on water we were able to get really close to the birdlife - starting with an African Darter which is an anhinga. 

African Darter

They look like a snake when they are swimming along because only their long necks stick out of the water.

One of the guides made a necklace from a waterlily plant by breaking off alternate portions of the stalk while keeping the milky skin in place and each of our partners were given one.

Waterlily necklace

Once we reached the island destination we were told about the role that termite mounds play in building up little islands in the lagoon.  The termites bring in seeds and in many cases a tree seed germinates and you see termite mounds with large trees growing from them.

Termite mound with a tree growing from inside

The island we were visiting was much larger than these little ones, having formed naturally on higher ground.  The approach to the landing offered these beautiful reflections in the still water.

Reflections in the lagoon

We were asked to tread carefully, keep silent and walk in single file, observing hand signals to stop or come forward.

We emerged on an open plain to see a group of young elephants with a matriarch.  We were on foot about a football field's length from them and, the guide later told us, downwind of them so not really easy for them to notice us.  

Matriarch emerging from the bush on our island

We were overwhelmed with the emotion of being on the same field as these elephants, aware of how dangerous they might be and yet comforted by the reassurances of our guides who were careful but confident in their presence.

After the matriarch emerged the young elephants came out including a rather crazy little one who ran on to the plain trumpeting and waving his trunk around in a display of youthful exuberance.  

Baby elephant joy

After walking across the plain and hearing from the guides about elephant and hippo behaviour and also how common elephant kills are in the Okavango.  The reason is that there are a few large prides of lions - sometimes with up to 20-30 adults, which makes it necessary to kill larger animals to feed all of them.  The lions tackle the elephant's back legs and then one or two of them grab the trunk to suffocate it.  It was a pretty brutal description.

On our return trip in the Mokoro we came across a beautiful bee eater.

Bee eater

Once we got back into the motor boat at the landing that we had started from we headed back towards our campground and at one point the boat captain suddenly slowed down and did a big u-turn to pull up at the bank where a huge crocodile was lying. 

Enormous crocodile

The boat captain pushed the nose of the boat right up to the bank a couple of feet from the croc and I was pretty panicky, having been at crocodile farms where they demonstrate the speed at which crocodiles can move both in and out of the water.

The captain reassured us that this one was really full, having very recently had a big meal and was not likely to be moving much - but I did breathe a sigh of relief when we pulled away from the bank and headed off again.

The next day we had to retrace our steps across the river crossings but this time they seemed less intimidating and the entire trip a whole lot shorter, if only because we knew what to expect.

The roads to our last wildlife stop near the Moremi game reserve were pretty bad.  We first had a stop in Maun overnight to break the journey at a community run campsite which turned out to be pretty noisy with a group of young people who didn't stop their loud conversations until about 2:30am.  Fortunately I slept through it all but Anne was pretty annoyed in the morning.  We had a word with the camp organizers and they were very good about it, saying that they don't want something like this giving them bad publicity and discouraging visitors.

The two towns that we stopped at in Botswana were intriguing.  They are pretty low key with a lot of the economic activity taking place in small little metal containers that are referred to as "tuck shops".  This is where we looked for eSIM cards for Botswana.

In the end we discovered that Orange - the French mobile company sell eSIMs for Botswana and there were adverts all over for Orange so we were able to get data for our phones for WhatsApp and google maps using the Orange travel service that we had used on previous trips to Europe, selecting Botswana as the target country.

We started early the following morning knowing that the roads would be a challenge.  The trip distance is 156km (96 miles) but the travel time was projected to be 4 hours and we took a little longer than that.

We were disappointed at first with the campsite which was not what we'd seen advertised but the person at reception and the community guide allocated to settle us in explained that they had to build these campsites because the river crossing to the main lodge and campsites was impassable by vehicles and could only be made on Mokoro boats.

After settling in for the night we felt a little more comfortable with the site, but the guide had warned us that there was a good chance of coming across PDAs (potentially dangerous animals) and we were prohibited from visiting the ablution blocks after dark and warned that baboons, hippos, hyenas and elephant could come into the campsite.

Hyena at her den, early evening

In the case of the first three it was at night and we were to learn after two nights there that the elephant could come into the campsite during the day.  Anne saw a group of hyenas in the campsite sniffing around on our first night there.  Since our meals were all vegetarian they didn't linger for long.

Hippos were close by.   We heard them in the evenings as they came close to shore but they honored the unwritten law to stay away from a campfire, as did the baboons.

On our second night we heard a loud, urgent trumpeting across the river.  I thought a matriarch was chasing off an unruly bull but our guide the next day suggested that they may have smelt predators nearby.  The next thing there was a loud splashing of something big wading across the swamp.  A large young bull was making his way directly to our camp.  None of us had the presence of mind to try to film or photograph it.  We stood gawking as it came closer.  Our friend had a bright spotlight and shone it at the elephant which we think encouraged it to move to the adjacent campsite which was unoccupied.

The next morning several elephants returned to the swamp from our side.  There must have been several more who ended up crossing in the night.

Our friend at the edge of our campsite watching one of the young bulls

  It was incredible to stand at the edge of the campsite watching them grazing in the water nearby.

Mokoro guide near the young bull elephants

The next afternoon as we were getting ready for lunch we heard some crashing in the bushes near the ablutions.  We had cut some tomatoes and cucumber for salad and we saw one of the young bulls pulling down and breaking branches of the mopane trees.  The guide had described this tree as "sugar cane for elephants".

Young bull elephant approaching our camp

We sat admiring the elephant until it became plain that he was not going to avoid our campsite.  The mopane trees were too attractive to him.

We retreated behind our friend's truck (well all but one of us who was a lot braver than we were) and watched as the elephant pulled down branches closer and closer to our rental and the tent above it.   Our braver friend stood near the front door and watched as it pulled the branches down right next to the truck.

The elephant then made its way very slowly around the front of our truck and then very leisurely through the campsite towards where we were hiding behind the other truck.  

We had to move at some point.  I leaned over to see what it was up to and it was standing a few feet away from me staring straight at me which prompted me to head over to our rental and wait behind it for more developments.

The elephant made its way around our friend's truck and then deftly threaded its way past their solar panels and managed to avoid stepping on the solidly made camp chairs.

At this point it was next to our two tables with lunch laid out.

The trunk carefully extracted a piece of cut cucumber and he tasted it before going again for the plates of food.  One of the plates fell on the ground and he managed to turn it over and check what was inside.

At this point he swung his trunk and it knocked both the tables over and the metal trunk with our coffee and campstove.

We all jumped (including the elephant) at the noise and it took a couple of steps towards the water before deciding that some plants in the shallows were worth eating as well.

In all the elephant spent about 2 hours wandering towards and in our campsite.  More to the point, 2 hours was how long we hid behind vehicles watching the elephant casually make his way around the campsite.

I noticed a second young bull come up half way through this and decide that it was too close to humans to take a chance, but the first one had no such qualms. 

In the aftermath I took a photo of Anne standing next to our truck showing how close the downed branch came to our vehicle.  The elephant has not quite left us, it is standing to the left of the truck at the edge of the campsite.

Aftermath

That night we went on a game drive and saw another final beautiful African sunset and a large collection of other game.  Our guide tried to find a leopard that he was alerted to by other guides but we were not lucky enough to see it.

African sunset

On our last day in Botswana we went on a walking tour with three San Bushmen who showed us how they approach going into the bush to hunt.

San bushmen with an elephant skull found on our walk

One of them demonstrated how they call zebra, they showed us medicinal plants used for treating ailments and injuries and then a demonstration on how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together repeatedly.

Our last day in Botswana involved a drive from our campsite to a campsite not far from the Botswana border. 

On the way out of the park we saw a hornbill with a mouse on the side of the road.

We took the 4-5 hour trip to Maun where we stopped to have lunch at a really nice little restaurant called Hilary's off the main road.  Our friends who traveled with us know a mutual friend of the owner so she was happy to hear about the connection.

Last meal together in Maun

The remainder of the trip was uneventful.  We drove in convoy to Windhoek where Anne and I dropped off the rental truck.

We had been using walkie-talkies to communicate on the trip and as often happens one or the other truck was listening to music or an Audible book so we would inevitably hear "come again" or "can you repeat that?" after delivering the first message.

When our friends were driving back to Cape Town and we were getting ready for our flight Anne wrote on WhatsApp that she wished we still had walkie-talkies to talk to each other so easily.  Our friends immediate reaction was:

Namibia: getting wilder and wilder

Another hard lesson was to result in us shedding our default trust in google maps.  The truth is that google has done a really good job of mapping the dirt roads, some of which appear to be changing at least as often as seasonably, but mapping the directions between two places is a complete fail.

Our trip from Otjiwarango to Halali lodge in Etosha was supposed to be a reasonably quick trip on a major highway (single lane tarred).  The tarred roads are classified as "B" roads, while "C" and "D" roads are dirt but well maintained in Namibia.  Google pointed out that the C38 - the main road North to the Anderson gate was closed in multiple places and suggested an alternate route to us as the most favourable.  This alternate route turned out to be a big mistake because it took us up dirt roads east of our destination and then across a dirt track directly to the Halali lodge that is actually a closed road because it has no entrance gate.

What should have been around 5 hours ended up being 7 and with the restriction on driving after dark we drove without stopping in the park, missing a wonderful sighting of an elephant and her baby near the road and several other places where cars were parked to admire the wildlife.  I was concerned about arriving to find the lodge gate closed.  As it happened we got there half an hour before dark and were able to get our tent up on the rental 4x4 before nightfall.

We met up with the person who originally organized the Skeleton Coast trip for us.  He was off on his own post-Skeleton Coast trip up river beds and into Angola and was stopping at Halali for a night.  It was cool to meet him, his partner and friends for the first time since the mid 80's when were knew him as a masters student at Rhodes University.  A lot of time has past and we ended up reminiscing about those years.

He said that they had been to the waterhole that is reachable by foot from the campsite and they had seen black rhino.  We decided to head there after dinner.  Black rhino are endangered and a fairly rare find but this waterhole had a group of rhinos that apparently were dominating it for a period. 

Black Rhino mother and child with adolescent male behind  Photo by Anne

A mother and baby where there when we arrived and then three adolescent males appeared and began to fake spar with each other, practicing for when they will be forced to leave their father's group and fend for themselves.  It looked quite aggressive and after two nights we saw the numbers dwindle as the sparring became more aggressive and they ended up drinking individually and making an agressive show if another one showed up.

Two young male black rhinos sparring at the waterhole

A group of zebra appeared well after dark on the third night which seemed surprising considering that the lions in the park are active after dark.

We had three nights in Halali and the waterhole was a big highlight.  Our friends, who joined us for the second night said that the infrastructure of the campsite had deteriorated quite a bit since they were last there 14 years ago and we were frustrated by blocked drains in the ablution wash basins and weak luke warm showers.

It turned out that this wasn't true of all the ablutions and I think if we had gone on a recce we might have found a suitable one not too far from the campsite.

After arriving fairly late on the first night we were able to find a much better campsite for the second night because the campsite (with more than 50 sites) emptied out by around 10 in the morning.  I think there were only about 4 groups of people who didn't move out.

On the second day Anne and I paid for an afternoon game drive which was very informative and we saw a lot of antelope,

A tiny Steenbok - a small common antelope

zebra

Group of Zebra at a waterhole

, giraffe

Giraffe at a waterhole

, elephant

Elephant kicking dust in our direction with the salt pan in the background

and a black rhino

Rhino after dark at a waterhole

but then we went on a self-guided game drive with our friends which featured the Etosha pan itself

Our travel companions on the Etosha Pan

and also sightings of elephant and various antelope.

On this self-drive game drive we had a curious encounter with a starling.  We had noticed how they hung about at the camp site not realizing how tame they have become over the years of being given or stealing food from tables there.  This one, as we stopped to photograph it, flew to my open window and landed on the rear-view mirror, looking at me with accusing eyes.

Starling insisting on being fed

Anne had some crumbs and sure enough it was quite willing to eat them out of my hand.

On the second night I took my 200-600mm lens from my carry-on bag.  I had used for years to photograph sport (mostly soccer) in Boston but after shooting 56 photographs it stopped working and no amount of research and cleaning of the connections in my camera or the lens would bring it back to life.  It is heavy and has become a useless boat anchor that I am lugging around - at least until I get back to Portugal and can find out if there is a service center than I can send it to to be fixed.

I also have a 70-200mm lens which is suitable for fairly close encounters so many of my extremely zoomed in pictures of far sightings of birds or animals were taken for identification purposes rather than as nature portraits.

The morning of the 3rd night in Halali was the 15th day after eye surgery and as predicted by the surgeon the bubble of air in my eye, which had dwindled until it looked like a tiny planet in my eye when I looked straight up in the air, disappeared completely.

From Halali we went to a second lodge in Etosha called Namutoni which had a fantastic infrustructure and great hot showers.  There is a fort there that was built by the German colonists and then destroyed by the locals and rebuilt a few years later.  It offered an overlook of a waterhole. There were mostly birds to view there.  

On the road we came across some giraffe behaving strangely with their necks extended and their heads facing the sky.  It turned out that they were eating bones in an area that was littered with bones. 

A giraffe eating bones

We wondered if this is a way of supplementing calcium.  We had been told on the game drive that the elephants have stunted tusks due to a calcium deficiency in the Etosha pan area. 

Just before we arrived there we saw a family of mongoose on the side of the road.

Mongoose family

The campsite featured a family of mongoose who visited looking for food.  Apparently they, like the starlings, are used to finding food where people are camping.

We watched the World Cup final between Argentina and Spain at Namutoni with a very excited spanish family sitting nearby who were hugging each other at the end of the evening.

The next leg of our trip was to a campsite near Rundu. 
Though we were not relying on Google maps I look at it and then ignore if there was a discrepancy in which case I'd favor the "satellite view" or the very detailed maps we had bought of the region.  In this case google thought the campsite was on the other side of the river which is in Angola and showed a 10 hour drive via a border post and then back along the Angolan side of the river.  In fact it was only 15min from the supermarket in Rundu that we stopped at to buy provisions for the next few days.

This one-night stop was at an absolutely beautiful campsite with sounds of a hippo in the evening as it emerged from the water for its night-time feeding along the banks.  This was our first experience of camping where there are no fences keeping wild animals out and we were warned to be careful at night if we needed to go to the bathroom because a hippo was a fairly frequent visitor, and there are crocodiles in the river that come on to the banks on occasion. 

A night-time trip to the bathroom is more or less unavoidable so we had to figure out how to make the that work.  Given that our tent was a roof-top tent the ritual included setting the headlamp on its brightest and scanning the area during a slow descent.

We saw a group of barn owls in the tree above us after dark.  The owner said that they lulled her to sleep each night.

We could have stayed there for a few nights and the owners chastised us because they had heard us playing guitar and singing.  They told me we should have come into the bar and played for them too.
My friend and I both had guitars on the trip.  His Skeleton Coast trip had left him with fingertips that were split from the dry air and working with his fingers securing his tent and equipment, so it took him a few days before he could play with me.

After Rundu we camped at another Namibian campsite further into the Kaprivi Strip called Mahangu.  This campsite was another gem. 

A pair of Bee Eaters

A hippo was in residence not far from our vehicles at night.  They make these low burpy growls and there was plenty of evidence of footprints to show that our campsite was a frequent spot for feeding at night.

In 1977-78 I was stationed for 8 months in a small airport at the end of the Kaprivi Strip that is now the Katima Mulilo airport.  I was in the army as a conscript.  This was at the tail end of the so-called "Border War" when South Africa had laid claim to South West Africa in defiance of a United Nations order to vacate it.

Sunrise on a game drive near Mahangu

There were alluvial diamonds to be had along the shores of Namibia and South Africa were "fighting insurgents" who turned out to be indigenous Namibians looking for independence.  Cuba had offered military support to these insurgents which made it easy for South Africa to claim that it was also a fight against communism. 

African Roller near Mahangu

At the time I had no idea about any of these details having been fed a diet of information curated by the South African government and the military.  I learned a different take on it all at university once my military service ended.
I did have a nostalgic desire to visit the site because it was a significant part of my coming of age and included some fairly dramatic moments.  It would have been an extra five hours of driving to get there and I concluded that it has actually been a fairly crappy time after all and why revisit it?  I have a few stories from those months but it is so many years ago that they rarely get retold these days.

On the opposite bank of the Mahangu campsite is a really large game reserve (Bwabwata National Park).  We learned that we could have camped in the Bwabwata reserve but having made all of our reservations months ahead of time were weren't motivated to make any last minute changes.

One evening we watched about 5 hippos who had spent a portion of the afternoon on the bank entering the river as a prelude to finding their night-time feeding spots.

Hippos entering the river at sunset

We went on a bird walk with a very experienced birder who showed us a Bat hawk and a little owl right near our site.  

We got back from the bird walk before dark and one of our friends called out that a lioness had appeared on the opposite bank.  I had enough time to bring up my camera to catch the moment she took a small warthog.  It was our first (and only) sighting of one of the big cats in the wild.

Lioness and prey

A visit to the Bwabwata reserve would require a 34km drive just to get to the entrance gate and so we decided to visit the Morombe reserve that spans the edge of Namibia and Botswana.  It is a game reserve that has a border crossing in it but we visited only a few kilometers of it to view a large Baobab tree

Large Baobab tree near Mahangu

 and we had some really lovely sightings of elephant, monkeys

Monkey on the side of the road

and miscellaneous antelope.

We were due to go to Botswana for the remainder of the trip the next day.  Little did we realize how much wilder it would be there.  None of the game reserves in Botswana that we would visit were fenced so animals roam freely between them including into the campsites.