Okavango Delta. Can you whittle?

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Up early and ready for our night out in the Okavango Delta. We load up the truck and jump on, it’s a bit of a squeeze but no one seems to care as we are all quite excited. We arrive, after about an hour, at the mokoro (dug-out canoe) landing area. Our stuff is loaded on, we are introduced to Baps our mokoro poler, we squeeze into the little boat and quietly slip into the Delta.
Baps pushes us along slowly, through natural channels between rushes and lilies, sometimes getting to into a conversation with another mokoro poler and crashing us through the rushes, only to be covered in bugs of every size, shape and colour. After a hot 90 minutes in the mokoro, a bit of singing, a rest now and again for Baps we arrive at what will be our campsite for the night. Camp was set up under the shade of a massive fig tree. It was sandwiches for lunch which would have been a simple operation had the cutlery and dishes been packed but they hadn’t, so it wasn’t! How we laughed as the bread was sliced with a pairing knife and plates were fashioned from tin foil. Dinner was going to be fun, pasta bolognaise with our fingers? Out came the knives (except our Gerber multitool which had mysteriously gone missing), we were all determined to have some form of cutlery made before our pre-dinner game walk as we would be eating as soon as we get back. We were ok as we had brought our own spoons (well, Charmaine had, thank god) but Darren decided to make a knife anyway, just so he didn’t feel left out. After the game walk dinner was eaten out of an empty mushroom tin, and we toasted marshmallows for desert. It felt like real camping.

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