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Published: December 6th 2007
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Scott being a man of leisure!
Poleing on the Okavango Delta Much of our time during the past several days in Botswana has been spent on buses. In sharp contrast to roads in South Africa, roads here are mercifully paved and devoid of all but the rarest pothole. Also in contrast to East Africa, the animals do not seem to stay within the game parks. This means that regular bus rides from A to B can turn into game drives. So far we've spotted several herds of elephants, water buffaloes, giraffes, and warthogsall from the public bus. Another fun thing to spot from the bus window are the huge termite mounds. These things are white, pointed, and quite simply massive.
Our main activity in Botswana was visiting the Okavango Delta. Here, the water of the Okavango River spreads out across the Kalahari desert to form an intricate web of waterways before disappearing , being either swallowed up in the parched ground or simply evaporated. We did a one-day trip and spent a pleasant morning being "poled" around the waterways on a
mokoro, a traditional canoe. The trip was going well until we stopped at an island at lunchtime and our guide, Soul, decided he was too lazy to take us on
the scheduled walk and instead planked down under the shade of a tree to rest. We managed to nag him into taking us on a 20-minute walk, during which he showed us a leopard print in the sand and ralayed stories of guides being killed by elephants! He then took us back to the boat, told us we had one and a half hours to "rest", and promptly fell asleep under a tree! One a half hours seemed like a long time on a small island with large predators , but we managed to while away the time by climbing trees and termite mounds, and gingerly going for a swim while joking about croc and hippo attacks (probably not a joking matter!).
By 2:30pm we'd exhausted all possibilities and awoke our inaptly-named guide, Soul (he had none!) He poled us back to his village, where we were met by our hostel owner and a few buddies for the trip back by motorboat. He surprised us with a coolbox full of beers and a stop along the river to swim. A lovely way to end the day!
Following this were two gruelling 12-hour days of travel with an overnight
stop in Botswana's dodgy capital, Gaborone. The only real point of interest along the way was the diamond mine at Orapa. We'd heard rumours from locals that this place is simply teeming with diamonds. Some locals claimed to have found huge diamonds just lying on the ground. However, they'd thrown the diamond back into the bushes, not wanting to risk being caught with an uncut diamond due to the harsh penalities - an instant jail sentence of 15 years! As our bus drove by it, Scott and I spotted lots of speks in the grass, sparkling as the mid-day sun hit them. Could they be diamonds? We joked that we should inspect the bus tyres at the next stop!
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