Speed Safari - Organised Travel in Southern Africa (Pt I)

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Here’s something I didn’t know. Although if caught in the open a human/lion confrontation would go badly for the human, when we’re sat in an open sided safari vehicle, perhaps wondering as I was what there is to stop a lion simply reaching in to drag us out like food from a large can, they in fact don’t see us as distinct parcels of potential dinner. Instead they regard the vehicle as a single large, noisy, yet harmless and ultimately unprofitable animal. Elephants too tend to go round rather than over (or indeed, through) tents because they perceive such things as large solid rocks. These are the sort of snippets I comforted myself with as we settled down one night in our tent, our usual night time soundtrack of city centre drunken revelry and police sirens replaced by the none too distant roar of lions and elephants tearing up the southern African bush.

Our attempts to re-integrate back into normal society following our world trip last year lasted less than a year. Two weeks less than a year to be precise. Compared to Antarctic glaciers, Andean canyons, the Australian outback and the like, enduring the daily commute to turn up at 09:00 (or more often 09:45 in my case) to do an eight (seven and a half…OK, six) hour day just didn’t quite do it for us. It was when I realised that the front of the approaching train that came to carry me off to my corporate prison cell each day was shaped like an upended coffin that I decided that something drastic was called for. One house sale later, a short stint in a rented city centre flat whilst we worked out our contracts and we’re off again. Africa this time, continent number seven for me (C already has the set). Tick.

Driven

For various reasons too irrelevant to relate here we chose an organised overland tour around southern Africa. “Driven” is a good word to describe this experience. We were driven in a truck almost 6,000 miles, driven through four different countries, and on occasion driven round the bend with the seemingly constant rush to keep to the schedule. The often frantic pace was a necessary consequence of the short winter days and a somewhat ambitious itinerary; a 27 day race from Cape Town in South Africa, through Botswana, via the Zambian side of Victoria Falls, across Namibia and down the Atlantic coast back to Cape Town. This was speed safari and it was taking no prisoners.

The Okavango Delta

One of the features of this tour that appealed to me was that fact that it took in the Okavango Delta in north western Botswana, a place that I had heard good things about. The delta is the end of the line for the Okavango river which rises as the Cubango river a thousand miles to the north west in Angola. It takes six months for the rainy season waters there to flow into the delta area where a combination of geological faults block further progress, causing the river to fan out into the only inland delta in the world and where some 98%!o(MISSING)f the water is simply swallowed up by the Kalahari desert. Winter here represents ‘high tide’ for the southern delta whilst in summer the waters recede to reveal salt pans and islands.

I’d like to say that we planned our trip specifically to catch the delta near its peak but even casual readers of these blogs will have picked up a certain laissez faire in our approach to planning and we just happened to luck out on our timing here.

We had an option to take a scenic flight over the delta the day we arrived at the gateway town of Maun. C was being sensibly frugal when she declined the option, her eye on the hugely expensive balloon flight further down the line and rationalising that it could not possibly compare with the scenic flight we took over the Great Barrier Reef last year. I of course am financially inept and should not anyway be trusted to make decisions when it comes to the chance to go flying. As it turned out C was the only one in our group who did not go. The flight lasted an hour and was so-so. Definitely not as good as the GBR flight. Not even close. Honest. Anyway, everyone felt airsick, even me and I’ve done aerobatics before now. I can honestly say we were all very relieved to be back on the ground afterwards.

Camping

During our trip only one night was spent away from any facilities whatsoever. The first night after crossing the border from South Africa into Botswana was spent ‘bush’ camping. We were told to set the tents up in a circle and there were strict instructions on ensuring that any night-time wanderings were conducted properly lest we encounter animals that do not recognise our position at the top of the food chain.

In the evening whilst the tour leader regaled us with tales of Japanese tourists inadvertently setting half of Botswana ablaze with some shoddy fire management a few years previously the fire monitor in our group was making a concerted effort on the world record for the largest campfire blaze, and with good reason. Fires quickly became a focal point of our evenings in camps, largely because despite the day time heat in Africa, the winter nights are bloody freezing. The trick at bedtime was to stand as near to the fire as you could bear without actually igniting your clothes, soaking up as much of the heat as you could, before making a mad dash for the tent before the accumulated warmth could dissipate.

Other than this one night in the bush and apart from a few nights in rooms of one description or another, we would fetch up at camp sites with facilities of varying quality. Somehow the idea of being intrepid explorers beating a path into the dark heart of the African continent lost its edge when people emerged freshly showered and announced they were off to the bar for an aperitif before a dinner magnificently prepared by one of the three person crew specifically employed as cook, though some of the ablution facilities on offer did put us on the fringes of civilisation.

My personal pet hate was the shower cubicle that provided no room to hang clean clothes without also including them in the shower experience. It’s not rocket science after all to build a dry zone into the cubicle, but here I think I may be missing the point of travelling in southern Africa. Our time in the delta area though took us to both ends of the accommodation spectrum, upgrading to a hotel room in the town of Maun and circling the tents for the next two nights in the Moremi Game Reserve (the place where lions and elephants serenade people to sleep).

Moremi Game Reserve

The opportunity to enjoy proper beds and clean sheets in Maun was cut short in the morning by a stupid-o-clock alarm so stupid I never even had to get up that early when I was a corporate slave. We had to unload the truck into the open sided safari vehicles that would be our transport for the game drive. I might have been able to cope with this, but the extended period subsequently spent standing around waiting for someone to tell us what to do because the only person who actually knew what to do had disappeared into town for some ice tested me sorely. Early mornings get to me that way.

Things eventually sorted themselves out and off we sped in our open sided vehicle, slicing into the cold morning air which in turn sliced through every layer of clothing we had on and made me at least feel that the ice run was something of an academic exercise. Some three uncomfortable hours of bouncing around on unpaved roads which degenerated as we entered the reserve into rough tracks and we had arrived, at a sand trap, still half an hour from the camp site. The support vehicle that had accompanied us was of no help, it had scooted on ahead to the camp site.

We had already seen antelope, giraffe, zebra and a hippo on the way and the excitement at being so up close and personal with African wildlife now gave way to apprehension as we were forced to evacuate the vehicle in lion country whilst it was being extricated. I checked out our fellow travellers to see who C and I might be able to outrun, but we were towards the wrong end of the group’s age range and heavy smokers to boot. If push had come to flee we would pretty much have been lion food.

The Seat Game

In an effort to ensure that everyone got a fair shout at, well just about anything the tour leader implemented a system of seat rotation in all vehicles. Whilst noble in its conception, ensuring for example that no-one felt that they had the worst seat for game viewing, this regime had a few negative consequences.

On an organised tour you surrender the freedom to make your own decisions. Wake up times, departure times, where you go, how long you get to view the scenery/eat/smoke/take care of life’s more basic functions etc are all pretty much set by the Itinerary which manifests an earthly presence in the form of a tour leader. Not only is this (the Itinerary that is) hard taskmaster a necessary inconvenience of an organised tour, the desire to fit in with what was until recently a group of complete strangers and to fall in with the collective objectives mean you are often complicit in the denial of your own personal liberty.

For example, if you’re packing nearly two grand’s worth of camera equipment and harbouring aspirations to be a top class photographer (OK, a vaguely competent one), it’s not really fair to expect the rest of the group to stand patiently by on too many occasions whilst you wait for that perfect picture (especially when you’re only at the ‘impressive equipment, bugger all skill’ stage of the photography learning curve).

The lack of any personal space anywhere that you could call your own simply exacerbated the sense of being reduced to a mere constituent part of a single whole. On a less esoteric level seat rotation also meant that under an already tight schedule the inevitable frantic pfaffing to get ready was made worse by the need to constantly shift piles of personal effects to a new location in the confined spaces of the vehicle.

Thus it was towards the end of this long day, having eventually arrived at the Moremi camp site, that we were hussled almost immediately away again on a game drive. My temper, already shortened by the rushed departure was not improved when I was forced to join in the hunt for someone else’s binoculars. As we pfaffed the vehicle bounced over the rough terrain and in all this palaver my bottle of deet was ejected over the side. In hindsight this was no big thing but at the time it was the final straw and the last of my good humour followed the deet overboard. Sod the big cats, sod the big elephants and sod the big bloody everything else, I just wanted to stop moving, sit by a fire, have a beer and collect my senses.

This is a shame really because the herd of elephants that emerged toward us from the treeline soon after, not 30 yards from where we pulled up, really was quite spectacular. I just sat there glowering, mainly because to cap it all I had ended up with the worst possible seat to see them, on the wrong side and right behind the cab. They eventually wandered round to my side but by that time my view was of some impressively large elephant rear ends as they wandered away and I don’t recall seeing many images of elephant bums in the portfolios of the world’s more successful photographers. I spent the evening in a quiet grump whilst C tried to track down Hyena sightings, successfully as it turned out, though this was due more to the fact that they were running freely through the camp rather any innate tracking abilities on her part.

The Leopard

A more serene boat cruise in the delta in beautiful clear blue waters the next day did wonders for my mood, and an elephant and a few hippos obligingly put in appearances for us. Some of the more hardy (or is that foolhardy?) of the group went for a dip as we stopped for a pleasant lunch on a sandbar in mid channel. Although they seemed more concerned about sudden croc appearances I wondered whether they were listening yesterday when we were told that hippos were the most prolific of human killers in the area. Even the Miami Vice-like high speed return journey (we were late, and that schedule brooks no nonsense) did not upset me unduly, nor did the rather hurried departure from the marina which, in our haste, nearly cost me my waterproof coat and did indeed result in one of our group’s thermal leggings being left as an inadvertent gift to the boatmen. Our safari driver you see had been busy in our absence and had tracked down some lions, clever man. So off we sped, yet again, and before long we came upon a tree which obviously had some attraction. This we could tell from a long way away by the infestation of safari vehicles parked below. It wasn’t the shade they were after. No, it was the leopard sleeping in its branches.

We were advised during our introductory group meal at the start of the tour that the chance of spotting a leopard in any one tour was about 1 in 3, so this was quite an exciting moment. Our driver’s solution to the problem of finding a parking space with view amongst the somewhat limited options now available was to clear his own in a minor act of vehicular aided deforestation. They were dead trees anyway and the watching crowds seemed more disturbed by the noise of us crashing through tree branches than the leopard was. Despite all this, the leopard’s tree was far from dead and the foliage permitted only partially obscured views. The only really good view was pretty much directly under it.

It was in my attempt to get better views, this time of a nearby pride of lions, that we learned that climbing out and perching on the edge of the vehicle is not the done thing in lion country (we hadn’t yet been told about that sneaky trick we humans use to disguise ourselves as big car shaped animals). The driver’s subsequent attempt to move on from the lions was met with shouts from the back whilst the girl originally sat behind and who had followed me out desperately scrambled to get back inside the moving vehicle. The tour leader in the front hadn’t seen our partial exit and was none too happy about our flagrant breach of bush health and safety. I say ‘our’, I was already back in the vehicle when it started moving and she only caught the girl.

(If any of our fellow travellers are reading this, see how I skate deftly over my embarrassing ’20-minute-search-through-the-bush-for-my-sunglasses-which-I-thought-were-lost-overboard-but-actually-turned-up-on-the-floor-of-the-truck-and-then-we-were-nearly-ejected-from-the-park-because-of-the-consequent-delay-getting-back-to-the-camp-site-before-sunset’ incident? It’s my blog and I get to choose the content).

Departing Moremi

Our drive out of the reserve the next day gave us one last opportunity for game watching, made remarkable at one point by the huge elephant that crossed immediately in front of us then turned round, ears flapping, trumpeting a warning at us to back off. The experienced driver at the front simply yelled back. Apparently if an elephant is going to charge it tends to do so straight away, not fanny about with warnings. We in the back didn’t know this though, did we? No, we were busy backing off as best we could without violating any extra-vehicular bush rules. Strangely enough not one of us managed to capture this special moment on film, though the opposite side of the vehicle, like a bijou property in an up and coming neighbourhood, suddenly became much sought after.

We had already left the main reserve and were driving through the hunting concession area on the way back to Maun when we got to enjoy the scenery at leisure as our vehicle’s engine died. The support vehicle was once again of no help, largely because its radiator had already sprung a leak and with limited supplies of water available for the constant top ups required it had scooted on ahead. The men in the group did what we men do in these situations; gathered round the open engine compartment to discuss what the problem might be without having the foggiest as to what actually was wrong. As we all stood around, secure in the knowledge that there was a big fence between us and the lions, our joking turned to ruminating on the hunter’s ability to discern tourist from game. We were stranded in hunter territory now and men with high powered rifles were prowling unseen. But worse, much worse than that, we were falling behind schedule and although she was hiding it well, it must only be a matter of time before the tour leader explodes…

OK, so there’s a rather obvious if naff attempt to set up a cliffhanger to entice you back for part II. This journal runs to six pages on the word processor and if you’re still reading this then well done, I would have got bored and moved on around about the shower diatribe on page two. The next edition is already under way and will be published just as soon as I finish it. There you’ll be able to learn that obviously we got away safely. You’ll also be able to read about our time at Victoria Falls and beyond, packed full with scenery and tales of pick pockets. Alternatively I may diddle around with the chronology and jump back to the beginning to describe our arrival at Cape Town and our progress through South Africa, regaling you with side splitting tales of our flight in (oh how we laughed).

Now published here.

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Photos

Baboons
These little monkeys (apes?) were waiting for us when we got back to camp after one of our game drives.

Elephant
Emerging from the treeline

Male Giraffe
Males are darker brown in colour

Erm...
...I forget. Evil looking though.

Late Afternoon
As the sun sets the landscape takes on a very rich brown palour.

Hippo Floating
These are very hard creatures to photograph, even with a 300mm lens. They only just break the surface when they're in the water and you don't want to get too close to them anyway.

Comments

[Steve "The Voice" Mitchell]

You call that an expidition !!
MMmm not much to say here!!! a quote from said blog "During our trip only one night was spent away from any facilities whatsoever" You guys really do need to spend a few nights up with me in the Rhondda Valleys you Muppets. Theres _uckall up there :) Later M+C Love always Mitch

[solid gone]

You call that English!!
Ah Mitch. How I've missed your subtle manner(s). Spending any time with you is an expedition in itself, besides which, we need a bit more practise in the third world before we dare venture to the Valleys :-) M

[Euan]

Elephant Butts
Enjoyed the episode about Mr Grumps, the elephants' back ends & the portfolios of those successful wildlife photographers.