The Gods Must Be Crazy


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Africa » Botswana
March 29th 2009
Published: December 19th 2010
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My earliest memories of Botswana were when someone in highschool updated their MSN and called themselves Bushpig. Their location was somewhere in the jungle, Botswana. How remote and untouched it seemed. In reality, Botswana is seen as an African success story. A sparsely populated country whose main concerns is not civil war, but the effects of AIDS.

The Khama Rhino Sanctuary Trust is a community based wildlife project, established in 1992 to assist in saving the vanishing rhino, restore an area formerly teeming with wildlife to its previous natural state and provide economic benefits to the local Batswana community through tourism and the sustainable use of natural resources.

I was lucky enough to visit the sanctuary on my first day in Botswana. We set out in jeeps through the park and saw plenty of rhino, wildebeest, giraffe and zebra. The rhino got nice and close, which allowed for excellent photo opportunities.

We stayed in the town of Palapye, at the Camp Itumela. We were treated to a nice dinner in the restaurant – Kudo & crocodile. After seeing the camping facilities, on the hard dirt, and the shower/toilet in an outdoor cubicle, I knew sleep would not be easy to get so I headed to the bar. Unlike most bars, the bartender, Mike, encourages intoxication. Iker, Craig and I had vodka shots. These weren’t your regular vodka shots however as in them was widgity-grub like bugs. These are a delicacy in Botswana – they were awful. After some more drinking we ended up on the bar dancing with the girls from Holland and putting up our Australian flag.

We bid farewell to Palapye the next day for Francistown, the second biggest town in Botswana. I was craving vegemite so at the shopping centre I went in mad search of the traditional Australian food. I ended up talking to some people at the supermarket, Gladys and Lenty – we exchanged contact details. Apparently Batswanans like to collect addresses of foreigners. Go figure.

We set up camp that afternoon – this was probably the most boring day in Botswana. Malaria is a big problem in this part of the world and we were advised this was high Malaria area. A few us went to the local Internet cafe and this is when the mosquitoes started out. We got a little paranoid so all went back to camp. At the caravan park was a casino with the old-style poker machines so Alison, Craig and I decided to go and bet our Pula for the night. We didn’t end up winning a whole lot but had a heap of fun with the old school machines.

Elephant Sands is a traditional safari bush camp about 50kms north of Nata in central Botswana. This was where we stayed the next night. We set up camp near a waterhole where elephants and other animals come to drink. The come up close and personal, and here I was, waiting for lunch when three walked not twenty meters from me to have a drink. There was no electricity at this site which was a good idea for an early night as the next morning I woke early to join the walking safari. Here was a good chance to walk by the animals in their habitat. We were all excited as our guide was carrying a gun for protection. Unfortunately, the animals weren’t out an about this particular morning and all I got to see was an elephant maybe 50 meters way. It was pretty cool to be on foot so close to the animals though.

The next town on the list was Kasane, a town bordering Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It was a busy little town, mainly full of tourists making their way between the four countries. It was situated on the Zambezi river, which at the time flooding. We were told not to set up camp to close to the water as hippos and crocodiles would not be far away.

The Chobe National Park in the countries northwest is probably best known for its spectacular elephant population: 50,000 elephants today, it is actually the highest elephant concentration of Africa. Moreover, most of them are probably part of the largest continuous surviving elephant population on Earth. The elephant population seems to have solidly built up since 1990, from a few thousand. They have not been affected by the massive illicit exploitation of the 1970s and 1980s. Elephants living here are Kalahari elephants, the largest in size of all known elephant populations. Yet they are characterised by rather brittle ivory and short tusks, perhaps due to calcium deficiency in the soils. I did an overnight safari here one night – not only does it have thousands of elephants, it has accessible lions, crocodiles, hippos, baffallo, giraffe and baboon. We felt a bit uneasy here as an elephant almost charged our jeep at one point and before bed we were briefed on how to understand a particular animal sound and what do should we see or hear one during the night. Alison and I bunked in a spectacular five star tent and at one point had lion’s fifty meters away at the most. It made for one of the most interesting toilet breaks of my life.

In the morning we went on another safari and saw the kill from the previous night being eaten by vulture. Half of the tour group had been infected with a severe bout of food poisoning. I thought I had escaped it, but was the last to get it. As we got back to the Kasane camp I began throwing up violently and could stomach only coke. We even went on a Zambezi Cruise to see birdlife and hippos and I was back and forth to the toilet. It was an early night for me to try and sleep off the sickness.

There are so many different and exciting activities to do in Botswana and I didn’t even get to go to the Okavango Delta, which most consider the highlight, or Gaborone, the nations capital. It is already popular on the tourist map but I don’t think it will be too long before Botswana goes to the forefront of the worlds mind and shakes off the tribal images associated with it from movies like ‘The God’s Must be Crazy.’



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