Mitch's Blog

Julie has picked up a few words of Tswana, one of the two major languages of Botswana. The other major language is English:

Kealeboga =thank you Dumela mma= good morning - different ending if you’re talking with a man vs. talking with a woman.
Re mono fela= we are just here
Re kgobile= we are relaxed 📓 🌍

In the morning at home, I look at the news. Here in Africa, in the morning I look at the gnus. A herd of wildebeest gathers on the plain outside our cabin as the sun rises.

Last night, one of the guides gave us a brief five-minute tour of the African starscape. One thing I keep forgetting is that we are in the southern hemisphere now, so the stars are completely different. Until last night, I forgot to look up at the sky. I can see Alpha Centauri, Antares, the Milky Way and those other places I’ve read about in science fiction books for so many years.

The man doing the star show used a laser pointer that shot out of visible beam of light, so he could easily point out the various stars in their location, as if we were in a planetarium. I did not realize laser pointers could do that. I thought you had to point them at something to display a dot at that location.

It is now about 20 after eight on Thursday morning. In a few minutes we will be leaving for what is billed as a cultural visit to a local village. I have no idea what is in store for us there. But I am looking forward to it!

Yesterday afternoon we saw a Toyota truck go by in the evening game drive, carrying a full load of black people. It was the first time I had seen black people in the back of the Toyota, as passengers, rather than driving. Our guide told us that they were teachers from the same school that we are going to visit today. They look very young, as though they were teenagers and students themselves.

The cultural event proved to be an excursion to Khumaga (khoo mah cha), a nearby village of about 2,000 people. We drove in on an unpaved dirt road, past houses ranging from circular mud huts to plain square brick buildings to small neat houses with proper windows and fences and cars in front that would not have looked out of place in a middle class American neighborhood. We saw some people, but not a lot, men walking in pairs at the kind of deliberate pace you maintain when you’re going to be waking a long way. Children waved to us cheerfully; we grinned and waved back.

We visited a school for kindergarten through seventh grade. A teacher told us briefly about the school. She seemed citified, in a brightly colored floral skirt and blue double breasted jacket that might have been a fleece. Fleeces are ubiquitous here, the resort staff wears khaki fleeces as part of their uniforms. The teacher asked for donations and seemed shocked when we told her, truthfully, that we had not brought wallets or cash. I’ve gotten in the habit of locking my wallet, cash and passport in my room safe when arriving at a resort. We just don’t need it. We’ll arrange a donation later today.

We went into a seventh grade classroom and the children broke into three groups to crowd around the three of us who visited from the resort, me and Julie and a man in his 70s who had previously volunteered at the peace corps, so he was familiar with this kind of place and situation. His wife, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, waited in the Toyota.

My little group of children, mostly boys 11-13 years old, pushed up against me in a circle. They asked me how old I am and marveled at the number (it amazes me too, kids) and admired my hair and shirt and shoes. They asked me what kind of animal is my favorite (our dog and cats at home – but in Botswana I like elephants, giraffes, zebras, gnu and baboons). They told me what they want to be when they grew up, a doctor, scientist, dentist and soldier. They asked me what kind of work I do, and seemed satisfied with the answer. They loved elephants and told me with relish that they can kill you. They showed me a worksheet of what to do and not to do when you encounter elephants. There is an elephant overpopulation problem in Botswana; the beasts trample crops and destroy property. The government is considering reversing the ban on hunting, to reduce numbers. The boys asked me my religion; I said Jewish, non-practicing. I don’t know if that registered. Earlier, the teacher had said the children study world religions and she listed a few, of which Judaism was not one. That’s reasonable; we Jews are few in numbers, just a few million in the whole world, and maybe a child in an African village has no need to know about us.

The kids and I ran out of things to talk about but they cheerfully demanded to be photographed, so we did that. They mugged for the shot and then crowded around the iPhone to see how the photo came out.

Afterward we visited the kindergarten, about 25 children in a one room building with a concrete floor and metal roof. They sat on the floor and colored and greeted us cheerfully. Then we visited a woman who wove baskets; she wore a pink bathrobe, belted carefully to make it look more like a dress.

Tomorrow, which is Friday, will be a travel day. Saturday too. Multiple hops to get from here in Botswana to JoBurg, where we will again spend the night at an airport hotel. I must admit I’m looking forward to a dinner that is not a production number, and going shopping at the airport stores for additional camera accessories. The on a plane Saturday morning for two flights and a road transfer to our next stop, in Namibia. Namibia and Botswana are neighboring countries so hopefully there will be direct flights between them one day.

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Leroo La Tau, our current safari camp, is in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park in Botswana, on the banks of the Boteti River. The resort is on a cliff overlooking a river and plain. We can go out on a deck and see wildebeest and zebras and elephants and stuff. Last night when I woke in the middle of the night, I heard a terrible screeching. It sounded a little electronic. Today I imitated the sound for our guide, Gee. He said it sounded like a jackal.

Gee is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, efficient and friendly, as all our guides have been. He has a restful energy, unlike TS, who was great but who could be a bit jangly. The hotel staff loves Julie, and treat her like a queen, which she deserves! Julie has been trying to learn a few words of Tswana, one of the common languages of Botswana (the other is English). I have followed her lead. We regularly butcher “thank you” and are working on “hello” and “good morning.” There is also “slowly slowly,” which seems to translate roughly to “take it easy” or “mellow out” or “chill.” Also, “we are here,” which seems to have a deeper meaning I have not been able to ken.

I am drinking far more liquor now than I do at home. At home I have 0-4 drinks per month. Here I have been having 3-4 drinks per day. At the end of the afternoon drive we have “sundowners” in the field; the guide mixes drinks and lays out snacks on the Toyota tailgate, or on a little panel that folds down from the front of the truck. I hae gin and tonic. Before dinner, we have more drinks. I have discovered Amarula, a liquor made from local fruit and milk. I’m told it tastes like Baileys, which I have not had in many years. Amarula is delicious. Then we have wine with dinner. I feel like Keith Richards.

The reason I don’t drink Baileys at home is that milk gives me an upset stomach (though I can no trouble with cheese and yogurt, which I love and consume regularly). Here in Africa, though, the milk doesn’t bother me.

And now it’s night and we’re in bed. We can hear water lapping not too far below the cabin. And we can also hear a variety of animal sounds, including a loud grunting that may be one or more hippos just a few yards away.

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We’re on a 12-seater Cessna now, on our way from Camp Xakanaxa, where we spent three lovely days, to our next stop, the name of which I cannot remember.

TS, our guide at Camp X [Note from 2020: I’m not going to spell it out] is tall, thin and handsome, with dark black skin and a broad smile. He tells people his name stands for True Story, because he only speaks truth. At other times, he says the name stands for other things. He has a dry sense of humor. He is passionate about being a guide, with a deep knowledge of nature and a strong drive to take us to see the most interesting animals and birds. He finds them by listening to their calls, driving slowly while hanging his head off the side of the truck to watch the ground for leopard or lion tracks, by consulting with other guides on radio, and apparently by extra sensory perception. When he hears over the radio that the other guides have found some fascinating animal, he throws the truck in gear and we careen across the road, bouncing high in the air. A few times I’m completely airborne above my seat. He usually doesn’t say what he’s after, but I know that when we’re moving at that speed it’s something good. Yesterday it was a leopard, which we could barely see when we arrived. That’s just how it goes; game drives are a lot of patience and luck.

TS is opinionated about which animals are worth stopping for – lions, leopards, elephants and giraffes – although elephants are less interesting than leopards, so we do not stop to see elephants on the way to a leopard. I love baboons and monkeys but TS thinks they are a waste of time so we do not stop to see the monkeys. That’s ok; we’ve seen plenty of monkeys anyway.

TS tells us he comes from a small farming village in Botswana, with 35 brothers and sisters from multiple mothers. Many people in the village were unschooled and illiterate; they believe book learning is a waste of time, compared with learning what they need to know for farming.

TS sat next to a group of Italians during lunch, and asked them how to say hello in Italian. Later, after I asked him, he said everybody he knows growing up came from that one little village. Now he meets people from all over the world. The world is an amazing place.

As I thumb-type this, we are in a small 12-seater Cessna, with those same Italians, on our way to the next stop for three days. We loved Camp X and felt a connection to the place and staff there but I’ll be glad to sleep indoors. And wake up indoors too. The tents at CX get cold at night and in the early morning when we get up for our dawn game drive. They give us hot water bottles after dinner, one each, which we carry to our tent in our arms and tuck under the blankets. And the blankets are lovely and warm and the sheets are clean and white. It’s quite cozy – despite how cold it is outside, 40 degrees, I still find myself throwing the blankets partway off during the night.

But it is most definitely not warm when we wake up.

And it’s dark at night too; camp power is provided by a generator and some of the tent lighting runs on batteries. The generator goes off around 10 and goes back on a little before wake up.

The food at Camp X is fantastic. [Note from 2020: True for all our camps.] I’m going to need bigger pants. Meals are served in a big tent; we eat at big long wooden dining tables and real chairs, with china and linen tablecloths and napkins and separate glasses for wine and water, like a restaurant. We serve ourselves from buffet tables and talk with the other guests and guides, who eat with the guests, about what we saw and did that day, although we did get into a brisk political discussion with a few Germans one night. I would have preferred to talk about the game drives. Political discussion is one of the things I’m getting away from.

The German who talked politics asked me, the next night, about my work. I had resolved that for the duration of this trip I would not volunteer what I do for a living, but would tell people when asked. So I did. I think next time I’ll make something up, like “Mafia accountant” or “large animal veterinarian.”

I’m thumb typing this on a 12 seat plane from Camp X to our next stop. 50 minute flight. We just swerved abruptly and I was overcome by vertigo and I closed my eyes. Julie said she saw another plane that we had swerved to avoid

Landing now. I’ll put away my phone.

And now we are at the Leroo La Tau Lodge, still in Botswana, this time on the desert. It’s 1:26 pm, we checked in, got our orientation talk from the manager, and had another enormous and delicious lunch. I brought two sets of pants, one for cooler weather and one for warmer weather. I should have brought bigger pants too.

LLT is designed along the same lines as CX, with huts with thatched roofs. But LLT is a complex of buildings, rather than tents on platforms. We’re told to expect cooler weather here.

This is the Kalahari Desert. Coming in on our 12-seater plane – Clement was our pilot again – we saw small villages of huts and cattle and goats penned in with rough fences, called kraals. On the dirt road to the camp – more bouncy bouncy in one of the ubiquitous converted Toyota trucks – we saw a truck going in the opposite direction, with a middle aged white couple in the cab. The woman, in the passenger seat, had a small dog on her lap. It occurred to me that this was the first time we’d seen animal who was a pet,in a week.

CX and Chobe Lodge were surrounded by electrical wire fences, high enough to stop elephants but let other animals through. We saw baboons on the lawn in front of our cabin in Chobe. A resident hippo wanders around CX, his name is Oscar. We saw him just outside the camp when TS drove us in to the camp on our first day; TS cautioned us that Oscar is not domesticated, he is a wild animal, and hippos are vicious too, and can move fast when provoked, we should stay 30-40 meters away. Not sure how you can do that in the camp, but it was a moot point; we did not see Oscar again.

When we drove up to CX, two managers greeted us with a big smile and a goofy dance. A short time ago that would have made me uncomfortable; I would have assumed it was a residue of colonialism and racism. Now I think it’s just how they do things. One of the managers was a tall, handsome, erect young man named Mox, with deep black skin and a broad smile. Unlike his colleagues, Mox spoke in a British-inflected accent; he told us later that he was educated in a private track in a public school and – he confessed – has an English girlfriend. (“Shocking,” I said, and he was surprised that I said it, but Julie explained that I was kidding. I said it with a deadpan that any American would have recognized I meant the opposite of what I was saying, but that inflection doesn’t translate. We told him that we have absolutely no problem with mixed-race relationships.)

But we did not know any of that when we were checking in. I saw him as another native member of the hotel staff, who likely spent his entire life in Botswana. So I was surprised when he said, as he picked up our bags to carry them off, “Alright alright alright!” Surprising to meet a Matthew McConaughey fan so far from home!

I’ve been thinking here about the legacy of colonialism. At home I had a vague, unarticulated idea that colonialism was unalloyed evil and that it had left a false skin on African culture that would inevitably be sloughed off as colonialism receded in the past. While I’m still no fan of colonialism, I now think the Africans regard the colonial legacy as part of their heritage, just as much as their native roots, and are in no rush to slough off European influences, any more than the English are looking to rid themselves of Roman and Norman influences. In general I have encountered similar attitudes when dealing with people in the developing world. In past decades we worried about American cultural imperialism, but people who live in the developing world seem happy to take what pleases them or is useful from American and European culture, and retain their native traditions where those are pleasing or useful. This also applies to China, which can’t be described as a member of the developing world anymore; it’s a superpower rivaling America, maybe soon to surpass us. [Note from 2020: I’m not certain I agree with my 2019 assessment of geopolitics here and post-colonial culture. I’d only been Africa a week when I wrote it, and less than four weeks total.]

Last night at CK I woke up in the middle of the night and heard animals calling nearby. I turned over in bed in the dark and saw, on the canvas wall of our tent, the shadow of a vast animal moving slowly by. I turned over and went back to sleep.

This evening as we were washing for dinner we heard the sound of two male elephants nearby disagreeing loudly.

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I literally squeed when I saw a mother baboon carrying her baby. “Oh my god it’s a baby baboon!” I exclaimed in a high pitched squeal like an 11 year old girl. The baby dropped off the mother, stood on his hind legs a wobbly moment, then looked puzzled and fell over. Who would not squee at that?

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Dawn river cruise. Instant coffee from metal camp cups at sunrise, mixed with hot water from a Stanley insulated bottle

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Kasane International Airport, outside Chobe National Park in Botswana, is tiny, but it is clean and modern and efficient. [Note from 2020: Kasane is small, but a proper airport. Many of the other places we caught planes were just airstrips — a grassy field with a long cleared strip, often graded but not paved, to accept small planes.] We’re here on our way to Camp Xakanaxa (pronounced ka-ka-na-ka), in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The plane is a Cessna 208 or 208B Caravan. It seats 12 but we are the only two passengers, along with pilot Clement and another guy, who I think is the baggage master. Other than the road, I don’t see a sign of human habitation from the air.

I watched the ground go by outside the window of our little plane. Dozed off. Woke up. Same. Ground was greener and wetter and swampy. We descend for landing. I see a few houses.

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The Okavango airport is a dirt airstrip with no buildings, just a structure like a Little League baseball dugout with a sign that says VIP Lounge. Good to see irony thrives in Africa. There is no Starbucks.

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TS, our driver, was moving fast and the truck was rocking and rolling over rutted roads. I was daydreaming when suddenly I was knocked off my seat and hit the unpadded metal floor on my ass, hard.

I was uninjured, which was lucky, because that’s how people get permanent, disabling back injuries. On the other hand, had I gotten a permanent, disabling back injury, it would have been a better story than everybody else’s story. Everybody else gets back injuries reaching for paper towels from the top shelf of their kitchen cabinets.

We parked next to two sleeping male lions, and waited a half hour for them to wake up. For the first part of that time there were about four other trucks parked in a semicircle, watching the lions. How would you like to be sleeping in bed and wake up to find 25 people in a semicircle around your bed staring at you while you slept?

TS asked whether he should get out of the truck and wake the lions up. We said sure, and he laughed. Funny guy, that TS. We agreed that taking a selfie with the lions would be a great way to become world famous and score many views and likes on YouTube. Unfortunately you would not be around to enjoy the celebrity.

Internet connectivity here at Xakanaxa is crap, electricity goes out at 10 pm so I’m just going to power down my phone at bedtime so it has maximum charge for tomorrow. Shocking!

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