July 16 to July 22

I've been camping and out of touch for a week but it looks like I can post today:

July 17

Call this three degrees of separation from home. The first degree is any foreign land. The second degree is the small towns and villages of the world away from some or all of the comforts of home. The third degree is to travel away from the villages into the hinterland, on a 4x4 truck, for instance, deep into the jungle or the desert. In this case it is something of both. Call this a dry swamp. Officially it is named the Okavango Delta, a confluence of rivers in northwest Botswana.

We got here by trucking for two days from Windhoek, east into Botswana. Most of this nation encompasses the Kalahari Desert, a vast land of acacia trees and thorn trees and low shrubs. Unfortunately, like many areas of Southern Africa, the ‘wildlife’ is more likely to be beef cattle than leopards or wildebeest. The habitations are traditional round huts of the Bush People. Every once in a while if you peer into the bush beside the highway you see a small collection of these huts. Their means of survival are few as far as I can see: goats, donkeys, and cattle. There isn’t enough water to sustain farming I don’t think. At least I saw no evidence of agriculture.

If you hang a left somewhere inside Botswana and head north you come to the only non-arid territory hereabouts. But even here the vivid blue water is surrounded by white, white sand. It’s as if someone quickly superimposed a swamp onto a desert. To get to our campground we had to off load from our truck and board a ponderous 4x4 ‘bus’. We plowed through swampland for 40 minutes till we came to a beautiful resort on a wide expanse of the river.

My group this time consists of five tourists and two guides. Manni is the black Namibian leader of our expedition. Solidly built with a deep, authoritative voice, he is a perfect choice to guide us. His sidekick is Joseph, a younger, smaller version of Manni. They sit up front.

In back are the six of us. Marcus and Laura are Germans from Munich. He is a biologist working on vaccines. Irene is a middle-aged manager for Ska Travel headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. She is on a kind of busman’s holiday, checking out our tour company at the same time as getting some vacation time away from her family. Omer and Tom are from Jerusalem, at least now that is where they live. Tom grew up in Farmingdale, Long Island about ten miles from my hometown. They are in their early 50’s I’d guess with adult children back home.

Just as we were leaving Namibia I grabbed a newspaper. Inside was a revealing story about a group of lions formerly resident in northwest Namibia near the Angola border. In fact these lions were observed trekking across the border a few years ago and quickly fitted with collars for environmental study and in a vain attempt to keep the lions—and their human neighbors—safe.

It started with one male, one female, and a cub. Before long there were two males and several cubs, a total of ten lions in the group. Then someone got a license to hunt one of the males. It turns out that wildlife hunting is so lucrative that the Namibian government is willing to risk losing some of their tourist attractions to reap this bounty. For tens of thousands of dollars you can go on a sanctioned hunt, which someone did---though apparently there was some dispute about who provided the sanction and whether they had the right to do so. But the lion was killed. The theory is that if only males are killed you still retain females to bear the litters.

You can guess the rest of the story. In the wet season the four-legged delicacies that form the lion’s diet migrated elsewhere. So the lions began eating cattle and donkeys of the local folk. So some of the lions were shot. Then, last week, the last three lions were found poisoned. The need to protect livestock trumped the more abstract need to protect the tourist industry. How this will end I don’t know. Tourism is a very big business in Namibia. There is a high school in Windhoek that is set up to train young people for the various tourist vocations. But one hunt for an elephant reportedly yielded over $100,000 for a farmer last year.

My eleven-day tour so far has been dull. Out of five days so far elapsed I’ve spent four days being driven around in a large van. But it looks like the next six days will be more active. We shall see.

July 18

The sense that is most useful in the Okavango is hearing. People talk about how you can see so many stars when you are away from the glare of modern life but no one mentions that out here you can hear things that generally are obscured by the noise of crowded life. Last night the woman in the tent next to me coughed in the middle of the night and I started, certain she had mysteriously invaded my tent.

So when we took off on little two-person canoes to explore the delta the things I noticed were sounds: the buzzing of insects; the mournful honks of geese; the soft splash of the pole rhythmically pushing us through fields of papyrus and reeds; the one, lone propeller-driven airplane overhead; the guttural bleats of the hippo we could hear but not see. And, later, the grunts of an elephant that was so far away he was only visible through the lens of the ubiquitous telescopic photo lens of my tour mates.

The day was vivid without being interesting. We were told over and over again that we might not see any wildlife; they migrate so fast that no one can predict where the rare elephant or hippo might be observed. But, nonetheless, we were all disappointed at one distant pachyderm and a guileless young croc who didn’t have enough sense to run away. The baobab trees were polite enough to awe. I didn’t know they were deciduous. So here were these odd looking things that seemed from another planet, leafless with branches like robot arms in a sci-fi thriller. I half expected them to lift up one foot and shuffle across the island.

Despite being in such an isolated location I can’t escape the calculations of freighted life; can I rationalize this expense? Most of my time has been moving from place to place in a van or a boat or hoofing it overland. The experience is ephemeral, in passing, summative. Every place is strange, and yet familiar. Is the Okavango fundamentally different from a trip south of New Orleans or on some Australian river? Is the Kalahari so startlingly unique that my senses are sharpened? No. So how can I justify such an expense? And yet, without the tourist infrastructure I would never have seen any of this and my trip would have been hopscotching from one hostel to the next, never really seeing African life. All this might not be worth the money; yet the alternative would have been to simply mark time in an existence I might have had as readily in Taos as Botswana.

My travelling companions are all veterans of this sort of thing and, so, sensitive to the obeisance’s and courtesies that allow six adults to share confined spaces without making anyone feel put upon. And yet, as often happens to me, my odd status as a single person of advanced age makes it hard for me to fit in. Spouses talk to spouses, young people talk to young people, and travelers talk with people they can relate to. I don’t fit any category. And I lack the vivacity to attract people to me.

Nights around the campfire are fun. We call the fire Namibian television. But the conversation is light, no confidences are exchanged, and I feel cheated of the chance to tell my life story, or to thrash out the world’s politics as I’ve done in Tbilisi and Suvanaket and…Now that I think of it I realize that those kinds of exchanges are the exceptions that stand out in my memory. Most of my stops around the world are of a kind with this place, solitary or with superficial chit chat.

We have five days left on this jaunt. If my theory is correct we’ll have one day or night that will be memorable that might make the whole expense of time and treasure worthwhile.

July 19

“Danger Crocodiles”. The sign next to our campground for the night says it all. We motored most of the day northward, back across the border to Namibia. We are actually only a few miles from Angola to the north and Botswana to the east. We came here mostly to drive through a game park along the Okavango. For my tour mates this is what they’d come for; a chance to view hippos and elephants and zebras up close from our van/truck. I wasn’t blasé about the whole thing but I also wasn’t captivated. My broken down little used camera is out of place in this group as much as I feel I am, myself, most of the time.

But last night, sitting before the campfire, I must say that I felt much better. We began solving the world’s problems, as I hope we would. The chitchat of previous evenings gave way to more substantive discussions; and I felt much more a member of the cadre than I had the past few evenings.

We stopped for the night here at “Rainbow Campground” a secluded little spot on the river—hence the warning sign. Tomorrow we head off northeastward through a little Namibian panhandle (consult your Google maps of Namibia) that will take us close to Zambia, our ultimate destination three days hence.

Our group has settled into a daily routine. We wake at either 6am or 7am and begin to pack up our meager belongings. Then we disassemble each of our four tents. Meanwhile our two guides begin breakfast (cereal and/or bread and butter or jam). We place our backpacks, sleeping pads, sleeping bags, blankets (it gets down to around five degrees Celsius most nights), and other necessities on a tarp for loading onto the van. Only then do we get to sit down before the campfire and eat. When we arrive at the next day’s camp we reverse the process, unloading, then tent construction, Joseph cooks us supper.

July 20, 2011

A trip through Chobe National Park begins an hour before dawn. About a dozen of us boarded an open-topped van for the short ride from our campsite to the park. Our guide was Michael: “You can call me Mike.”

Mike’s English was British enough to sound distinguished but African enough to sound quaint. Multisyllabic words he rendered staccato. CAM EH RAH. AN EE MAHL. But, like many people who come to English late, Mike hasn’t felt the need for all those linking words. “The road, i’tis rocky. You have camera, it might fall, break. Better keep in pocket for now.”

The park was stark—he said rhymingly. I expected grass but all we saw was white, endless sand. There were trees, most of them deciduous so few leaves to look at this time of the year. There were shrubs. Where else would the lions hide? We never saw any lions, a great disappointment to all concerned. We did get a fleeting look at a leopard. You should understand that Botswana tourism is based upon wholesaling lots of visitors in lodges, then trucking them retail in vans to drive through the park. I don’t know how many vans were in the park today but enough so that when the word went out via shortwave radio that someone had seen a leopard we found ourselves blocked from the animal by six or eight other, almost identical, vehicles. All we actually saw was the rear end of her body dashing between a couple vans ahead of us.

We saw lots of animals: dozens of giraffes, a few elephants, buffalo, jackals, vultures, endless varieties of antelope, birds by the score, a squirrel, hippos on the river below us, and, most importantly, a hyena. I can now testify that a hyena is a uniquely ugly, intimidating, unsociable, malevolent, unsanitary beast. I know this because the animals of Chobe are so inured to human presence (at least if you stay in your van—people on feet are another story) that they go about their business without paying much attention to the gawkers. (One giraffe kept munching away at the leaves of a roadside tree even after we motored up within ten yards of him.) Our hyena crossed the road in front of us carrying the carcass of some kind of antelope. His massive jaw tugged his prize to a convenient spot beside the road. Then he slowly backed up from the thing till he found a good vantage point to check out the competition. There were two jackals—little guys compared to the behemoth hyena—circling, hoping for just a taste. And a flock of vultures landed on the sand across the road, obviously waiting to see how things played out.

Mike says the hyena was nervous that the original owner of the carcass, perhaps a lion, would return to reclaim his or her breakfast. This fearsome looking thing with massive front legs and a sloping body that ended with shorter hind legs looked like the devil himself to me. But he apparently lacked confidence about his ability to retain this meat if someone bigger and badder came along. So we sat in our van staring at this guy while he surveyed the odds that he could eat without being disturbed. Finally, after about ten minutes, and, especially, after the jackals began sniffing too close for comfort, Mr. Hyena returned to his prize and began dragging it into the underbrush. That was the last we saw of him.

Even after five days of this chasing after big game I don’t have any great insights into how this all fits into the lives of the people of Southern Africa. What I see is a kind of monoculture of tourism. Every country has its legions of tour companies selling visits to the various national parks, everyone doing the same thing, showing the same animals, using the same tents and vans and propane tanks. It seems akin to that other bulwark of the African economy, mining. Admittedly elephants are a renewable resource but my impression is that, in fact, these living things are not going to be renewed, that gradually they will be killed off leaving the continent impoverished in the same way that the diamond mines are doing. The lions of Northern Namibia are gone through a combination of hunting and poisoning. Rhino poaching is one of the most lucrative occupations in South Africa. Desertification and urbanization is swallowing up habitat.

There needs to be a Steve Jobs of African tourism, someone to dream up the next big thing; something that preserves the animals and plants for posterity but that requires more human intellectual input, making for a more diversified industry. Africans need to create their own high value products rather than selling this basic tourism thing.

We’re due for part deux of our park project in about two hours. This time we will sail down the Chobe River, which borders the park to the north. We’ll be looking for crocodiles and elephants and hippos.

In the 18^th century in France the courtiers at Versailles used to go to the King’s bedchamber to watch him eat and perform his ablutions. That was the image I had today on the river. In a semicircle were about a dozen flat-bottomed watercraft of various descriptions. There was one two-story aluminum catamaran-style boat; several boats that looked like a London double-decker bus without the wheels; a few small aluminum boats that held no more than a dozen tourists. All had Mercury outboard motors. And all were arrayed so that the passengers could watch one or more elephants stuff eelgrass into their gaping mouths—or in one case simply watch a regal bull make his way across the river back to the Botswana side. The Chobe forms the border between Namibia and Botswana. The Namibia side is flat and fecund with grasses because it is submerged during the recently-departed rainy season. The Botswana side in a gradually sloping hillside of red soil spotted with tall trees.

We didn’t spend all our time watching elephants. The hippos were present and accounted for. They had the easiest role. They sat sleeping in the mud along the river bank, except when one member of the ‘raft’ (which the guide informed us was the name for a group of hippos) yawned.

And we saw crocodiles, again sleeping. They ran our boat up within ten yards of this dozing monster and he (or she) never moved a muscle. What predates a crocodile, afterall?

July 22, 2011

You know, immediately, when you enter Zambia that you are in a different world. The climate north of the Zambezi is clearly more tropical, warmer, more ‘Central’ Africa. But you also know, when you cross the border, that you ain’t in Botswana (or Namibia or South Africa) anymore.

You cross into Zambia on a boat, a ferry to be exact. Before you get to the ferry landing you pass a quarter mile of parked semi-trailers hauling beer and lumber and all manner of goods. The ferry is a remnant of a former time. High up top is a lone captain surveying the narrow crossing. The distance is about twice what Ichiro could manage on a throw from the outfield. And the ferry is equally modest in size. It can hold, at best, five automobiles—or one semi-trailer and a couple compact cars. Foot passengers fit themselves along the sides as best they can. Local passengers are likely to be carrying something, something for sale on the Zambia side. Cases of hard cider seemed to be the most popular item. Young men spent most of the time that the ferry docked on the Botswana side toting cases and cases of the stuff. Riding beside the ferry were about a dozen two-person canoes being poled across the river. These were, we were told, the smugglers. There seemed to be no need to be surreptitious about this ‘crime’. The ferry was not an orderly place.

And immigration is similarly chaotic. Once you get to the Zambia side you join the queue of people bearing blankets and TV’s and the aforementioned cider. If you are lucky (we were) there are only a few folks ahead of you. But our driver wasn’t so lucky. He languished in an office signing paperwork and paying fees for over an hour while we waited in the van. But, eventually, we were on our way to Livingstone, Zambia, named for the bible-toting paterfamilias of this place—at least as far as the white inhabitants are concerned. The principal reason for coming here is to view Victoria Falls, an impressive deluge of water.

We saw the Falls. We took pictures. We did the usual tourist things. I was suitably awed but hungered for some contact with local folks or something that didn’t involve elephants or canoes. We got our contact with Zambian folk, but it wasn’t the kind I was looking for.

We decided to eat out for a change instead of the campfire fare. We chose an upscale place on the main drag in Livingstone. We arrived at 7:45 and ordered. Eight o’clock came; then 8:30; 9:00, 9:30. No food. Waiters disappeared into the kitchen. They returned bearing beverages, but little food was evident.

Then a meal was delivered, spare ribs. The menu mentioned 500 grams of meat. Three small pieces of beef testified to about 50 grams on my tourmate’s plate. He sent it back. More waiting. Then a few meals were brought. But the spare ribs people (there were three such orders) were mealless. Finally one brave woman in our party marched into the kitchen herself. Much shouting was heard. She returned with some rice for the spare ribs folks. More waiting. Another trip to the kitchen. More shouting. This time her visit was prolonged, but, voila, finally she returned with the spare rib meals for herself and her fellow sufferers.

But our suffering was not over. We waited for the spare ribs folks to finish their meals. Then we tried to get a bill. Much adding was done by the waitress on a nearby calculator. Totals were added and re-added. Mistakes were made. Finally, at 10:45 the last of us escaped the Zambian version of service. The lesson is, don't be in a hurry in Zambia.

I have one more night in the tent here in Livingstone. I then hope to travel into Zimbabwe tomorrow.