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!