Botswana Day 1--Baines' Camp, Okavango Delta

Where to begin? We're at Baines' Camp in Botswana's Okavango Delta. The camp itself is amazing--it has a maximum capacity of ten guests and sits in the middle of the swamp on stilts. The main building is open-air and includes a living room, a campfire pit with a porch around it, an outdoor dining patio and an indoor dining room. The rooms all have a bedroom and bathroom, and a porch that looks out onto the delta (which is beautiful--it's not a gross, smelly swamp--for the record). At night, you can roll your bed out onto the porch and sleep under the stars. The beds all have mosquito nets so you don't get eaten alive while you sleep (the bugs aren't bad to begin with). The maids put hot water bottles between the sheets while you're at dinner so you stay warm all night.

You can see hippos while you eat dinner on the patio--they come and wade in the pond the lodge hovers above. Elephants and other animals frequent the lodge, too. We have to be escorted to our rooms at night so angry leopards don't keep us up past our bedtime.

The staff is pretty amazing, as well. From what I can tell, it's made up of the managing couple (he's from Capetown, she's Irish), 5 or 6 local women, 5 or 6 local men, and 2 or 3 other men who work as the safari guides. The housekeeping staff, a.k.a. "the ladies," clean the rooms twice a day, turn down the beds, let down the mosquito nets, roll the beds on the porches, and wash your clothes once a day (it's complimentary!). There are no phones at the camp, so wake up calls are done in person. One of the staff knocks on the door of your room and enters with tea or coffee for you half an hour before breakfast, which is followed by your morning game drive.

The food here has been the best we've had yet. They have tea at 3:30, too, which has proven to be another meal entirely, not some light snack like one would assume. Dinner is at 8:00, after the game drives come back, and breakfast and lunch are served buffet style. Last night I ate ostrich. If the waiter had told me it was beef I would have believed him. It didn't taste like poultry.

Our safari guide is Martin. He was born in the delta and speaks 3 languages: the local language, Tswana (the national language), and English (really well). At lunch he was telling me about tourism's impact on the delta's local people, and he said Botswana has laws regulating the hiring practices of lodges and camps like Baines'. If they set up shop in areas that are inhabited by people, they have to hire the locals in every position, save for those that require qualifications the locals don't have. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that--everything I read about African safaris suggested we'd have a white guide and black tracker , but Baines' Camp has employed the locals in the most lucrative job at the camp-guiding.

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