Briefly boating through Botswana

The Okavango Delta of northern Botswana is a 16,000 square kilometer area of beautiful river and creek channels through marshland. The Okavango River begins its journey in Angola and the waters of the rainy season there take three months to make their way through Namibia and into the floodplains of Botswana. We are told that it is the only river in the world that terminates into the middle of a landlocked country; its waters just seep into the Kalahari desert.

Although we experienced some monstrous thunderstorms in northern Namibia, the water from those rains have not yet made it to the Delta so there are fewer lagoons and channels. This was to our advantage.

Our group disembarked from the Interpidmobile and climbed into mokoros (2-passenger, one-poler dugout canoes) to travel to our camp an hour’s journey away. Bayju, our poler, taught us about the birds and trees of the Delta as we cruised among the papyrus stalks and grazing cattle waded in front of us. It wasn’t until we were close to our destination that he revealed to us that the channels we had been travelling through were maintained by hippos, and then we heard them. A big pod of maybe 60 animals were grunting and cavorting in the lagoon near our campsite. After setting up camp (on dry land), we returned to the lagoon to watch the sunset at eye level with the the hippos and crocodiles.

Cow grazing in the delta.

 

Hippo showing us his teeth before sunset, Okavango Delta.

 

Sunset from our mokoro, Okavango Delta Botswana.

As we sat around the campfire that night, a lightning storm lit up the sky around us in every direction as if we were in its eye. The rain never came, but the flying termites sure did. We were getting used to these rainy-season visitors by this point: we had watched their evening ritual of emerging from their 6-ft tall nests after dark to mate and head off into the world to make new colonies since leaving the deserts of Namibia. Much like moths, thousands of these 1/2-inch flying insects bombarded us (flying into the backs of our heads) as we sat next to the campfire. Our plan was just to keep them out of our shirts and let them be, but our polers rapidly dug a hole to collect them in for a meal at some other time. We are told they are delicious rainy-season delicacy once pan-fried.

The mokoro was our main way of getting around the Delta and after three days. Once back on the Intrepidmobile we traveled on to Chobe National Park in northeastern Botswana. Chobe is renowned for its elephant herds, so we were excited as these big beasts had eluded us for the most part when we were Etosha National Park (in Namibia). We were not to be disappointed as we found a few herds near the main roads even on our way into the park and our campsite near the Chobe River on the outskirts of the border town of Kasane. On the morning of November 23 we went on an early morning game drive (Beilttog sibs: the vehicles were exactly like the ones from the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland) where we saw some creatures, but it was the evening boat cruise on the river that really yielded great animal watching. Groups of hippos were up out of the water grazing on the river banks, each with an egret following along to munch up the upturned bugs. Although most of the hippos paid us no mind, it was crazy to see some of them sprint full speed back to the safety of the water, crashing into it with a big Hippo grunt. We were lucky enough to find three groups of elephants down at the river drinking their daily water ration (up to 50 gallons for the big matriarchs), playing in the mud, and socializing. There were quite a few super-adorable baby elephants with their mothers.
Chobe NP and the town of Kasane –near the junction of the four countries of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – were our last taste of Botswana. From here we crossed the river into Zambia.

Big bull elephant, Okavango Delta.

Baobab tree at the Botswana/Namibia border.

Warthog at our campsite near Chobe National Park, Botswana.

Warthog family cruising the parking lot near the grocery store in Kasane, Botswana (near Chobe).

Hippos (and their egrets) grazing along the Chobe River, Botswana.

Elephants along the Chobe River.