Okavongo in our hearts

The mechanics in Chipata dismantled the whole steering wheel of the car, worked at it for about an hour with various tools (including a saw!) and since it was a Toyota (like almost any other car in Southern Africa) they had the small spare part for the ignition that we needed to be on our way…

The three hour delay meant we couldn’t make the Livingstone-train leaving Lusaka that night. But Katja and Nicolas, the Germans who gave us a ride, let us stay with a friend of theirs in Lusaka and the next morning we all set off for Livingstone in their car. Only a flat tyre delayed us this time, so we arrived in the afternoon to enjoy gin&tonics overlooking the Zambezi river!

Livingstone was crowded with backpackers - something that we had not encountered earlier on the trip. All affordable places were full, but we were lucky again - another friend of Katja’s lent us a tent and we borrowed enough blankets to survive the cold, cold nights (well, we did “borrow” a couple of big pillows from the sofas of the backpacker’s place and we did wear three layers of cloths and our woolly hats as well!).

Normally this time of year the Victoria Falls are running a bit low, but this year the flow was still high and mighty. 1,7 km wide and pouring more than one million litres per second down the 108 m high falls, creating spray that could be seen from miles away. Wow! was about all we could say. We walked around and also made the more adventurous climb down to the rock pool, wading over some of the smaller tributaries. Down by the rock pool we sat and watched the even more adventurous guys that were bungee jumping from the bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe. But we thought the price of USD 100 for about 30 seconds was a bit too much…

Vic Falls are impressive but Livingstone is not - a dusty main road like the Wild West and too crowded with 19 year olds riding on organised tours with overland trucks and drinking too much (all wearing the same sweat shirts with their names on so that they wouldn’t get lost). So we decided to move on - next stop Botswana.

A shared taxi took us to the boarder, we crossed the Zambezi on the pontoon ferry and found a minibus to the closest town Kasane. The bus onward had already left but after only 2 minutes on the highway we got a lift with a police officer who was going all the way to Maun - the gateway for the Okavongo Delta. We stayed in Maun for two nights to be able to shop around for a good deal to get into the delta and we also managed to go horse back riding and kayaking nearby the town, which gave us a small taste of what to come - even though we didn’t see any hippos while kayaking, just as well!

Okavongo is the story about a river that gives up halfway to the ocean and forms a huge inland delta, to the delight of all kinds of animals - and well-off tourists. Botswana has decided to earn much from each tourist rather than having super many, so there’s really no backpacker scene and everything is on the expensive side - this is what we’d been saving up for! And boy was it worth it!

The delta is exciting from start to end - to be able to get there you pretty much need to fly in, and we boarded a six-seated Cessna, with Mattias as ecstatic co-pilot (the only instructions; “Don’t touch anything”), for what must be one of the most scenic flights ever, ending on a small dust strip. Then, three days of sheer luxury at the private concession of Little Kwara, with mokoro-rides (dug-out canoes is the idea, but to save the last large trees these days it is mainly glass fibre) on the shallow rivers, boat tours on the deeper, game drives at dawn, dusk and night, safari walks… and in between soo much food and drinks (all inclusive). With only five mansion-tents, guests are never more than ten, though most of the time we were only four, easily outnumbered by the people there to take care of us. And the wildlife; seeing a cheetah with four cubs resting in the sun and later coming back to see the cheetah-mother hunt for impalas, succeeding at the third attempt and then sharing the kill with the cubs… that is amazing, and doing that without ten other cars around you is unheard of. Later, we saw lion-teenagers trying to get buffalo steak, along with countless elephants, hippos, and around fifty bird species we hadn’t seen before, all much due to guides that really did some serious tracking (including leaving the car for long spots, and one guy sitting in the very front of the car only looking for tracks). And the flight back rounded it all up with even more game viewing from above; the whole 30 minutes back we flew at less than 200 metres, seemingly only just above the heads of elephants and giraffes.

All good things come to and end, and expensive stuff ends rather sooner, so we then boarded an overcrowded bus for Ghanzi, halfway to the Namibian boarder, right in the Kalahari and home to a tribe where women must wear hats that look like buffalo horns and will have their two upper front teeth hammered in once they marry. Stay single, seems to be good advice here.

From Ghanzi we moved on further west and crossed the boarder into Namibia, thanks to getting a lift with a cool South African/Britt/Isle of Man guy (when we had almost given up and were getting worried about sleeping on the side of the road out in the semi-desert) and got off in the dusty town of Gobabis. From there we were excited to get back on a train, but the trains had stopped running - seems like our inter rail is turning into a hitch hiking trip! So here we are in an oversized hotel/camping with only six guests and they don’t even do bush walks or other touristy stuff on weekends. So Windhoek here we come - we have already tried out the beer!