Exploring Botsalano Game Reserve, South Africa

(Priscilla's narration)

The last few weeks we've stayed closer to home but have had some nice adventures nonetheless:  a couple of nice trips to survey mountain aloe near Molepolole; dinner theatre at the "No. 1 Ladies Opera House" where we saw "I, Claudia"; a night out at the movies to see "Eat, Pray, Love" and Ethiopian buffet afterward, walks to the Botswana Botanical gardens, and close encounters of the giraffe-kind at Mokolodi Game Reserve.  Despite these pleasures, the itch to leave Gaborone for lands further away was steadily mounting. So we decided to take our first camping trip out of the country to Botsalano Game Reserve in the Northwest State of South Africa.  We planned to leave on Friday morning and come back Sunday afternoon. As the week progressed our excitement grew and Thursday morning I set about putting things together for the trip. Unfortunately mid-afternoon I had a growing headache and felt nauseous. I thought if I took a nap it might just go away, but it seemed to get steadily worse and I was unable to sleep because of the headache. Jon finished packing for the trip as I writhed in bed or lay on the floor in an effort to feel the comforting coolness of the tiles.

By morning, after a night of vivid disturbing dreams, I was feeling only slightly better but decided to go ahead with the trip because I was so looking forward to a respite from Gaborone.  Because of my sluggishness, we didn't leave until about 7: 45AM just as traffic was reaching it's full peak of insanity, but luckily it is pretty easy to get on the A-1 and head south from our part of town.

We decided to cross the border at a small station near Lobatse, rather than at a bigger crossing to the south near Ramatlabama, because our guidebook said the views to the park were better from this direction. Bear in mind that I was still feeling very ill: I had the feeling that there was a water-filled glass sphere inside my skull that I was trying not to break, even the thought of sipping water made my stomach lurch, and I had the type of malaise that makes you feel as if nothing, absolutely nothing, matters.  As we approached the border crossing, it was obvious that we needed to stop and do something, but there was no directional signage and there were many small buildings and parking areas scattered about. The process of getting through the border is a muddled and confusing memory for me of going to and from various wrong offices several times, obtaining and giving up various pieces of stamped paper after showing our passports, temporary residence permits, car registration, and driver's permits to multiple people. There were 12-packs of condoms available for free on the outside of one of the buildings.  The clearest memory I have of the whole ordeal was the SA customs officer "suggesting" we buy him a cold beverage, which we did, and then we were on our way!

From the Botswana border we headed southeast into the Northwestern State in South Africa and passed a large wildfire moving up a canyon and along a ridge north of the road.  We could see thorn trees burst into flames as the front of the fire advanced. It was a cloudy day and we could see what appeared to be rain-bearing clouds building on horizon.  Upon reaching the small village of  Dinokana with its one tiny store and smattering of very modest habitations scattered about, we turned south and headed up an escarpment to a plateau with a purportedly stunning view of the broad valley below, but due to the cloudiness and growing haze, our view was limited. Along the roadside we could see scattered homes and farms of the very poor working class people of this region.

Thanks to the book "Guide to Greater Gaborone" by Alec Campbell and Mike Main, we were able to find the the Reserve easily, but it is worth mentioning that you must pass TWO incorrect signs indicating that you should turn to the left off the main road to get to the park. After about 23 km, we arrived at the correctly signed main entrance to the Reserve, which is located adjacent to the road on which we were driving.  Botsolano Game Reserve is just under 6,000 hectares of grasslands interspersed with bushveld and encompassing portions of one of the oldest volcanic craters in the world.  It is very inexpensive and seems to be an excellent choice for those hoping to avoid more expensive and luxurious venues.

Leopard tortoise

Upon reaching the park, I felt I just had to lay down somewhere so Jon quickly put up the tent and I climbed right in and slept fit-fully for several hours.  I woke about 2PM and then felt I could rally for a drive across the Reserve. The campground at Botsalano is pretty simple, but there are shady tentsites and there is a bathroom with running water that the monkeys like to frequent.  From the campground, there is a large network of very good roads from which to view wildlife.  Almost immediately, the beauty of the land captivated and cheered us both.  We were delighted to come across a leopard tortoise just minutes after leaving the campground. For those of you who don't know, I spent a good bit of time working with desert tortoise in Las Vegas, and, oddly enough, we fostered a lost pet leopard tortoise for several months in Fredonia several years ago. So I was delightful to see a wild leopard tortoise ambling though her native terrain.  For the rest of the three hour drive we were continually awed by the beauty of the landscape and the abundance of wildlife. Because it was overcast the colors of the grasses were brighter than usual and there were all shades of gold, russet, green and burgundy in the rich tapestry of numerous grass species.

We saw several antelope species we had not seen before: waterbuck, eland, gemsbok, and blesbok, as well as many herds of impala, springbok, and wildebeest, and scattered groups of zebra, kudu, warthogs,  and ostrich.  At the end of our loop, we stopped at a wildlife blind that was located on elevated posts above a waterhole. While we were there we saw several black-backed jackals (beautiful!) and a rhino with a baby came up to drink, along with many antelope. It was hard to tear ourselves away from this scenario, but we left just as it was getting almost too dark to negotiate the sloping ladder back to ground level.

As soon as we got back to the campground I felt that I had to rest straightaway and headed into the tent, leaving Jon to produce and enjoy dinner by himself. We were the only campers and it was wonderfully quiet.  I quickly fell asleep, only to wake up around midnight with a very full bladder.  I could hear an owl issuing three deep hoots periodically, and the sound of hooves, grunting and chewing.  I was wondering if the rhino mom and her babe, that we had seen at the waterhole and that Karin and Pat had seen near the campground several months ago, were grazing nearby. But it was mainly the thought of puff adders and spitting cobras along with 6 other venomous nocturnal snakes on the park wildlife list that had me procrastinating about my trip to the bathroom.  When I could wait no more, I unzipped the my door of the tent and turned on the headlamp to see if the rhino was in my intended path, and was greeted instead by four sturdy patchwork legs looming up into the darkness among the acacia trunks-a giraffe was in in the campground! :)

Storms rolled through intermittently the rest of the night, but none were very long-lasting or too severe. Dawn arrived bright and fragrant.  Upon emerging from the tent I walked out into a golden field nearby to look for rhino tracks and to see what the monkeys were up to.  I was a bit nervous, not wanting to startle a grouchy mommy rhino, so when I heard a sizzling sound and saw lightening stretch horizontally across the sky and end with a deafening kaboom, I nearly jumped out of my skin and found myself suddenly back by the tent watching Jon come laughing from the bathroom and saying "Wasn't that exciting?"  I was feeling much, much better after 12 hours of sleep interrupted only by more vivid dreams and our visiting giraffe, so we headed out right away.

Groovy of termite mounds

Hibiscus

Jon under a sociable weaver nest

This day was one of the most beautiful and enjoyable I have spent in a long time.  We saw five more leopard tortoise over the course of the day and, with small squalls moving through, the light and our views of the landscape changed almost every minute.  Looking across the landscape at one point we saw the most enormous nest in a camelthorn tree and felt we just had to check it out.  We traipsed across the grassland to the tree to discover it was a sociable weaver nest with hundreds of individual nests woven together. While there, we noticed some fresh dropping nearby and then realized they were full of dung beetles energetically cutting out little (well, not that little if you are a dung beetle!) balls of dung and rolling them away.

Dung beetles making dung balls

 When we first arrived at Botsalano, we realized that the low mounded rocks we had been seeing on our way to the park entrance were actually another type of termite mound that we had not seen before. Now we were seeing great groupings of these, which brought up the question "What do you call groupings of termite mounds?"  Such as a "murder" of ravens, or a "school" of fish, we decided it can only be called a "groovy" of termite mounds. If we are wrong about this, please do not enlighten us on this particular matter, because that is our story and we are sticking with it.  Later in the afternoon we stopped at a waterhole and were surprised to see a marsh terrapin emerge at the shallows, probably in wait for one of the African quailfinch to get careless while sipping water.  On

Waterbuck

Looking up at the sociable weaver nest

the way back to camp, we returned to the elevated hide, and saw enormous clouds blow in during the sunset.  Strong winds rocked the platform but it held, and the thatched roof protected us from the rain that suddenly came down like nails from the sky. As the rain subsided, a group of red hardebeests with two young came down for a drink.

Cape ground squirrel

Eland

We headed back to the campground looking forward to another night of peaceful slumber, but were greeted by a group of young people and the biggest tent I have ever seen. This tent had two side rooms and a porch.  I quickly whipped up a green thai curry over the campstove, and we dashed in the car to eat it just as another huge deluge hit.  We turned in early thinking we'd like to rise at dawn. Alas, that was not to be, primarily because our energetic campground buddies engaged in extremely loud and emphatic drinking games until, oh around 5AM.  Because they were speaking in Afrikkans we could not understand a lot of the hubub, but it culminated in one young man repeatedly screaming a fairly recognizable obscenity beginning with F as the other members of the party spoke in soothing voices.  When he reaped the full rewards of his efforts, he made a much bigger mess in both the women's and men's bathrooms than the monkeys ever did, rendering them unusable by the rest of us. I was gratified that there was no evidence that anyone in the crowd had a weapon. At least two members of his group (young ladies) were as unhappy with him as we were.

Biggest tent ever

On our last morning, we headed out on a small loop before heading home. Right away we came upon a group of eight giraffes right beside the road and spent a good bit of time watching two of the teen-aged males banging necks. I wish I could effectively explain how gracefully their movements are and how peacefully inquisitive they seem to be with their big soft eyelashes. They would stare at us for some moments and then start to chew while still calmly looking at us. I almost could not force myself to stop taking photos because each expression or pose seemed more appealing than the last.  We had some nice glimpses of new birds including a secretary bird, and a huge mixed flock of little birds that included two blackfaced waxbills that sat touching side by side for more than fifteen minutes as a big windstorm passed through. And even another leopard tortoise, bring the total to 7!! It was all we could do to force ourselves to leave the reserve at a reasonable hour for the trip home.

Youngster

When we left, we decided to make a very short side trip to the town of Makikeng so that we could get a taste of a small city in South Africa.  It was Sunday, but there was still a bit of traffic and the downtown is comprised of a bunch of one-way streets so it took a bit of driving around to find a place to safely park. We selected a fast-food restaurant in a strip mall beside a "Spar" grocery store. Though Spar is a chain grocer that is present in Gaborone, I thought I would check it out to see if items that are hard to come by in Botswana (like walnuts) might be available in South Africa. Unfortunately, it seems the grocery stores close at 1PM on Sundays, whereas the bars are open all day!  Jon ordered a small meal called a fish "swarma", which is something like fried fish strips in a pita with some cole slaw and I ordered a coffee, and we sat near the window to watch the street scene while we waited.  Right away, we noticed a serious of disagreements were taking place among a group of street gamblers (some kind of marble game that involves money?). They began slapping each other around and there were various disagreements involving shopping carts, which, I guess, must have to do with a deposit you get back when you return the cart, but this is only a guess.  The disagreement between two such individuals right in front of the window we were seated by escalated to the point at which one of them scrounged around in a garbage pail, found a bottle, broke off the neck, and began brandishing it as a weapon. When his opponent, ran across the street and returned with two big bricks, everyone in the restaurant including us, ran for the back of the restaurant. The manager went out and sort of monitored the situation without doing very much. It is unclear why, but eventually the weapons were tossed aside, and the discussions continued as Jon and I slipped out the door and down the shopping center to our car. Too bad these guys just can't bang necks and be done with it, eh?

The border crossing at Ramatlabama was still a bit confusing but much more efficient than the one near Lobatse.  In front of us was a small pick up truck with five elderly women with traditional figures and dressy clothes riding in the back.

Driving through the fire on A-1 in Botswana

On the route back to Gaborone we saw another fire; this one had crossed the A-1 and damaged many acres of cattle posts. A group of firefighters had apparently put out one advancing front but seemed to be ignoring others.

I never cease to be amazed at how much our lives and our impressions of life can change from day to day, hour to hour, even minute to minute. As we we pulled onto our street, we noticed that our entire street was parked up, including a line of cars totally blocking access to our house. We thought it must be a huge party or event of some kind at the Thapong Visual Art Center across the street from our place, and since we had a carload of camping gear to unload, we were concerned about access. A man who seemed to be directing party-goers approached our car and we asked how we could get into our driveway. He took down the licence numbers of the cars blocking our driveway, said he would ask them to move, but then walked into our neighbor's yard. Suddenly it struck me: this was NOT a party, but a memorial. We quickly called the man back and asked him to please forget the issue-we could just unload later-but he insisted and had people leave the gathering to move their cars. We could hear singing and spoken prayers next door as we unloaded our things.  As soon as Jon checked his email our worst suspicions were confirmed. Our neighbor, a UB professor who had just invited us to his daughter's graduation and 21st birthday celebration two weeks ago, had succumbed to an unnamed illness. He left behind a wife and four children: a son who just entered medical school in Ukraine, a daughter who just graduated from college, and another younger daughter and son. He befriended us from the start when we moved here, and our hearts are heavy with the sadness his family is burdened with at this time.  There is more to say, but is it too challenging for me at the moment.  With that, I hope that each and every person reading this tale will take a moment to remember what a gift each moment is, to the extent that you are able.  We miss you dear ones so take care!

Tracking the Wild Mountain Aloe

Jon measuring a tall mountain aloe

We've finally started work on a research project and it has been wonderful to just go out in the field and do something like the sort of thing for which we came here! Coming up with a research topic was more difficult than we expected. No one at the University has shown any interest in collaborating, and it is hard to know what has been done or is in progress because access to this kind of information has been next to impossible.  These problems are compounded by the difficulty in physically reaching some of the places in which we might conduct research, due either to poor roads or great distances.  Jon is also busy grading countless exams and essays and jumping through all the necessary hoops at the University.

So for the sake of practicalities, we chose a site that we could get to in just over an hour and for which we could find no previous work.  Our study site is on the outskirts of Molepolole, the third largest city in Botswana.  In scattered areas around the town there are stands of Aloe marlothii (mountain aloe), a magnificent tree aloe that grows up to 20 feet tall and produces wild-looking sprays of flowers and fruit.  Legend has it that in the dark of night about 120 years ago, an invading Boer force mistook a forest of Aloe for a group of wildly-outfitted warriors and fled.  Various guidebooks state that these forests are much degraded and that people are worried that they may be disappearing, but there is no scientific data to support these claims or any information available regarding the forests' population structure or the longevity of individual mountain aloe.

Melinda and Jon inventorying a mountain aloe plot

Aloe seedlings are really small and pretty hard to see

First we spent some time exploring the outskirts of Molepolole and we found a nice stretch of mountain aloe not too far from the road and not behind fences or other barriers to access.  We decided to take a look at the population structure of this stand. We set up random 10 meter by 10 meter plots in which we measure the height of all the aloes, the numbers of leaves, flowers and fruit capsules.  We also measure the distance to each aloe's nearest neighbor and record if there is a nurse plant and, if so, we identify the species of the nurse plant.  Many succulents, such as saguaro cacti, require a nurse plant that supplies shade when they are young.  We plan to undertake a few other investigations in this spot and examine at least two other nearby aloe sites.  We are wondering if young individuals are common or lacking,  how they are distributed, what characteristics are correlated with successful reproduction, and things of this nature.  Hopefully this will give us an indication of the current health and potential longevity of the population.  We are working on this with another Fulbright Scholar, Melinda Laituri, who is visiting Gaborone from Colorado State University.

Looking up at the aloe canopy

On a typical day, we leave for Molepolole by 6AM in the blissful morning coolness when the traffic craziness has not begun.  By 7:30 AM the traffic has become perilous and the temperatures are beginning to soar!  While we are working, picturesque carts pulled by four or five donkeys roll by with the driver shouting various instructions to urge the donkeys on and people occasionally walk by on their way to cattle posts.  Signs of woodcutting is evident and some aloes appear to have been dug up for landscaping use.

Sometimes seedlings are very numerous

The middle aged seedlings look like they
 could play a role in "The Little Shop of Horrors"

One thing that is illustrative of the culture here is that even in a sizable City like Molepolole, there is no sit-down restaurant that we have found (unless you call KFC a restaurant) and there is no public bathroom.  Eating out is just not part of this culture, although there are various "take-away's", where people choose a meal from a cafeteria-style serving line, which they take away with them in styrofoam containers. Fourty-four years ago at independence, there were no restaurants in the entire country except for a few places for safari hunter types.  So by the end of the day we are hoping that one of the gas stations will have a functional bathroom where we can wash up and buy a cool drink of some sort.  Driving back home can be hair-raising experience because some people pass long lines of cars and we have to be ready to pull off the road at any time in order to avoid a head-on collision!

If you have thoughts or questions about our project, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment below!

Our Recent Trip North: Nata, Kasane, and the Limpopo River

It was the first lengthy break for the University of Botswana, and we finally had the car running, insured and had gotten some practice driving time, so we decided to make a lengthy camping trip on our own to areas to the north of us in order to see how accessible things are and better plan future trips as well as to provide advice to our friends who are thinking of visiting. We were eager to visit Chobe National Park, and even though we are still lacking a 4WD vehicle, we thought we would find out what we could experience just getting there in our little car and camping, rather than booking an expensive safari tour.  We decided to try to camp in Kasane, a small town located on the edge of Chobe National Park and adjacent to Botswana’s border with both Zambia and Zimbabwe.  In looking at the map, we figured that Nata would be a good point to stop and spend the night to break up the trip.  We had also previously signed up to participate in Birdlife Botswana’s annual camping trip, which was to take place Sept 30-October 3^nd on a private farm in the Tule Block region.

We left early Sunday morning and managed to beat the traffic out of Gaborone.  We took the A-1 Highway, which is a major road leading from Botswana’s southeastern border with South Africa up to Francistown and then into Zimbabwe. From Francistown, you can catch the A-3, which will take you to Maun, but at Nata, you can catch the A-33 up to Kasane.  Except for a few miles near Gaborone, the A-I is a single lane of travel in each direction with few pull outs and no passing lanes.  The A-7 is much the same as the A-1, but the A-33  is under reconstruction for much of it’s course and traffic is currently using a narrow temporary strip of thin and pitted pavement that runs parallel to the construction corridor. All of these roads have numerous police checkpoints and veterinary checkpoints where you may or may not have to demonstrate that your brake lights and turn signals are working, or dip your shoes or drive your car through a vat to sterilize them against hoof and mouth disease.  On the way back from Kasane one guy made Priscilla take off the shoes she had been wearing the whole trip and pull an unworn brand new pair out of the suitcase and sterilize them instead!

The beginning of the trip went smoothly and we hit Francistown by 12:30, having gassed up further south in Mahalapye. Francistown is the second largest City in Botswana and has what looks like a real downtown, but on closer examination reveals many of the same chain stores that we see in Gaborone. We made one slight navigation error but quickly found our way out of town and on the correct road to Nata, and arrived at the Nata Bird Sanctuary by 2PM.

The small village of Nata lies about 18 km west of the Nata Bird Sanctuary, which is situated on the northeastern portion of Sowa Pan.  The Sanctuary is the result of a community based project established in the 1990s by four nearby villages.  The Sanctuary has an inexpensive campground but it is close to the road and the employees we met seemed spectacularly unmotivated so we decided to check out the campground at the nearby Nata Lodge.

  The Nata Lodge is very pretty with clever landscaping and thatched-roof bars and chalets and a pool next to a birdbath and feeding station.  The campground is a tad more funky, but the ablution blocks (toilet and shower facilities) are works of art with wonderful showers and spacious dish washing facilities. Campers are permitted to use all of the lodge facilities.   After we had set up our campsite, we took a sunset safari tour out to the pans with about 15 Dutch and two cheerful but kinda bored safari guides (they do the same safari every day).  After about 8 hours of driving, being a passenger in an open vehicle caressed by soft winds and tooling though endless open grasslands and patches of salt encrusted pan was a wonderful and sublime pleasure.  Impala, wildebeest and ostrich ambled about in the distance and we saw patches of Hoodia and native aloes.  We followed the course of the mostly dry Nata River, which during the rainy season empties into the pan.  The puddles of water were sparkling with salt crusts and contained lesser flamingo, black-winged stilts, pied avocets, Egyptian geese, plovers, and numerous other birds.  The flamingoes number in the millions during the rainy season but this time of year there were only a few.  We drove out to the edge of the pan which stretched to the horizon.  This is part of the world’s largest salt pan complex and the safari was only the briefest of introductions, but it enabled us to see that we could easily drive our car out the next day.  Upon return to the Lodge campground we were treated by a small group of bush babies leaping throughout our campsite as we were eating dinner. The next morning we enjoyed lots of songbirds in the campground during breakfast, then we were able to visit the Sanctuary on our own and take our time contemplating the vastness, watching more birds (including a kori bustard the world’s largest flying bird) and hanging out by some of the-salt encrusted water in the river bed.

The following morning we cruised though the village of Nata and beyond on the remaining 300 km to Kasane.  The road goes though endless scrub, dry forest and grassland with some impressive recent burns.  There were elephant bones, including a skull by the side of the road and at small pan Marbou storks picked at the insects crawling around the elephant poop.  Just before Kasane we pulled into Kubu Lodge (Kubu = hippo in Setswana), another beautiful Lodge sloping down to the Chobe River with a campground that is a tad more funky.  After setting up our tent, we drove into the village of Kasane, which is a sort of relict frontier-town that now mostly caters to the upscale safari trade.  We went to that rarest of rarities in Botswana – an actual café!

  At 2:45 we were back in the parking lot of Kubu lodge waiting for some French folks to show up so we could leave for our Chobe River safari.  The lodge took us to the marina and eight of us boarded the 14-passenger boat with the wonderful Moses as our guide.  We set out on this most beautiful of rivers passing locals fishing for Chobe bream, kids jumping off of a dock (for real!!), and upscale $1000/night lodges with thatched-roof bars overlooking the river.  Then the amazing began to happen when we entered Chobe National Park.  First we saw some African darters, cormorants, storks (at least 3 species) and fish eagles standing on the marshy island banks or on dead trees; then some huge crocodiles lounging on the bank (do not trail your fingers in the water); and then impala, red lechwe  and Chobe bush buck on the banks.  Elephants appeared and soon were all over the place and swimming across the river.  The adults can walk across and the babies swim.  Groups were crossing this way and that.  Hippos gamboled in the water and we all watched for their stumpy toothed open mouth displays.  Herds of Cape buffalo (the most water dependent of the major mammals) clustered on the banks of a large green grassy island in the middle of the river.  Being on a boat we were ridiculously close and the animals did not seem at all interested in our presence.  So many birds were everywhere but the elephants were distracting and we felt as if our eyeballs were overloaded!   This is the height of the dry season so animals are densely clustered by the River.  The landscape away from the river is parched.  Of course we had a sunset with the silhouettes of bull elephants.  Moses was a genius at positioning the boat here and there.  We could have stayed out there forever but the cruise was a full three hours for a mere $40 including refreshments and all things must end eventually.  Back at the lodge we sat on the deck at the bar in the soft African evening.  The lodge has a buffet with the usual gargantuan quantities of meat and a little salad but we asked if they had fish so they whipped some fresh Chobe River bream just for us.  We left the restaurant but stopped in at the lobby to ask a question and it turned out we were the only people in the campground (although it was supposedly full), so in order to  avoid patrolling it, they put us into one of their chalets -- a luxury evening!  In the morning we took the guided nature loop that began at the lodge, wove through the campground, then followed the Chobe River back to the lodge.  Down near the river the path became very overgrown and the labels for the trees seemed to be mostly missing. Then we noticed the print of giant tail drag in the sand by a mound!  Just as we decided we had better head upslope, a giant crocodile surfaced at the edge of the water....so yes, we headed back to the lodge. There at the other end of the trail was a sign indicating that the nature trail was closed (presumably due to a crocodile nest on the path)!?

Unfortunately, we had to leave early the next day in order to make our way back to Mahalapye, where we were to meet the Birdlife Botswana other campers before travelling to the camping location.  We headed back to Nata and along the way we spotted elephants grazing in the grasslands, a herd of zebras, and a giraffe that we paced for at least 20 minutes as it walked along the road.  The giraffe seemed very confused by the construction and seemed to want to cross the road but eventually gave up and ambled away.  After spending another wonderful night at the Nata Lodge Campground, we were up at 5 AM to be sure we could meet the Birdlife Botswana group by 12:30. We were worried that there would be traffic in Francistown, as we were told there often is, but it turned out that it was a holiday-Botswana’s 44^th Independence Anniversary.

Traffic through Francistown was light and smooth but by the time we hit Palapye and Mahalapye, we converged with hordes of people who had left Gaborone earlier to return to their home villages for the holiday weekend. Traffic was absolute madness in both of those towns.  We managed to gas up in Palapye after going to THREE gas stations overrun with customers, and then visited another gas station in Mahalapye for the bathrooms after parking on the A-1 because there was no possible way to pull into the gas station at that time.  We went to a designated meeting spot but had to wait quite a while as the other campers hit the same mayhem at the gas station that we had observed. When we finally met up with the others, we caravanned out to an entrance to a private farm about 75 km west of Mahalapye where we had been given permission to camp.

Knowing that rural roads in Botswana were not usually drivable for those without 4WD, we had asked repeatedly prior to the trip if the roads were appropriate for a saloon car (which just means sedan) and were assured repeatedly that we would have no problem.  We asked again at the gate to the farm and were told again that we would be fine.  Well, shortly thereafter it became abundantly clear that this was not the case, and we were very quickly stuck in deep sand.  The remainder of the trip to the campsite was a hair-raising multi-hour affair of pushing aside sand drifts with the underside of our car, running over waist-high and thorn-filled acacias to avoid such drifts, banging through several rocky areas, and often being towed to get us through the deeply rutted sand tracks.  At one point the group had to stop and turn around because we had taken an incorrect track.  We ourselves would have gladly turned around and gone home or back to Kasane instead, but at this point we couldn’t because we were surrounded on both sides by eager campers, all of whom were in high clearance 4WD vehicles, and we were behind a locked gate in a maze of dirt roads with no map to or from our destination. When we finally arrived at the campsite, we had little choice but to accept a barren site with little shade that was surrounded on all sides by other campers.  The campsite was adjacent to the banks of the deeply-entrenched Limpopo River, which separates Botswana and South Africa, but it consists of just a flat area with no structures or infrastructure of any kind.

It is difficult to explain just how stressful this was for us. After many weeks of trying to get the car running (we had to replace the battery after numerous short-lived jump-starts by kind neighbors) and insured (two insurance companies and 10+ days of bureaucracy), and learning to drive in Botswana, and then to finally make it out of town on our own to beautiful Kasane and the Chobe River, only to leave Kasane after less than 24 hours and end up miles behind a locked gate in a blazing hot campsite on a severely overgrazed landscape with a leaking tire was almost too painful to contemplate.  The hovering worry about the trip back out of the maze of sandy roads and then to hope the tires would last the trip on the A-1 back to Gaborone added to the difficulty in enjoying the time there.

The routine was to meet at 7AM for a two to three hour-long bird walk along the river.  The trees lining the river banks were amazingly gigantic winterthorn trees (Acacia albida), relicts of the past before the land was exploited by cattle, and the birds were plentiful. The river was nearly still and we saw many crocodiles, along with fresh water crabs, water monitors, impala, bushbuck, wildebeest, and kudu. After the morning birdwalk, most folks went back to the campsite to socialize until a late afternoon drive to another location for cocktails.  Unfortunately, all of the areas we saw that were not adjacent to the River seemed pretty devoid of wildlife and it was too hot to hang out in our campsite so we usually stuck to the River.  The first night we went on the drive with our friends Pat and Karen, but we opted out on the second night.  Upon return from the drive each night, folks gathered around a communal campfire to share a grilled dinner. Being preferred vegetarians, we weren’t much interested in sharing the grill but we gathered at the campfire to socialize anyhow.

Perhaps the best thing about our four days on the Limpopo Farm was the chance to meet Gavin and Marjorie , who own and run “Gavin Blair Safaris” out of Victoria Falls. Luckily for us, they were taking a much needed break and joined the Birdlife Botswana camping weekend for fun and relaxation.  They are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate with the added gift of being talented at sharing their knowledge in a way that is accessible to people from all walks of life. They offer individually-tailored, upscale, once-in-a-lifetime safaris throughout B otswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.  If you are thinking of taking a safari of this kind in the future, we recommend that you look into their services at: http://www.gavinblairsafaris.com/index.html

From Gavin we learned that our suspicions about the land being severely overgrazed (not just the end of the dry season) were correct. He told us that private farmlands had fenced cattle out of the river corridors about five years ago due to concerns over foot and mouth disease, but the arid landscapes take many years to recover and the end result is that wild game are trapped in a narrow corridor along the river and continue a cycle of overgrazing.  On the way out we were towed pretty much the whole way! Our fellow birders were quite helpful in getting us out of there and several even called to make sure we made it back to Gaborone.  The A-1 on the way back to Gaborone was quite an experience.  People impatiently pass many cars at a time, at speeds in excess of 140 km/hour, no matter what the oncoming traffic.  It was incredible to be passed by ten cars as the oncoming traffic pulls off the road.  Especially when many of these were pick-ups with the back full of people!  Woah!

Now we are back and Jon is busy grading Biology essays and Biostatistics exams.  Jon is happy to finally have a UB ID card which means he can have access to the library.  Priscilla is catching up on the shopping and laundry and we will have to get our slow leaking tire repaired one day this week.   Next weekend we plan on continuing to work on our aloe project near Molepolole. So thanks for perservering through this long-winded tale. We hope this will give some of you an idea of the type of adventures you might expect if you visit.  We miss you all and think of you often so take care until we meet again!