Coming home

---

Last days
Thursday
We left Sitatunga Lodge at 7 am. The trees by the bar restaurant were very quiet both this morning and the night before. The night we stayed here before there were bushbabies playing in the trees, and the following morning there were vervet monkeys. Rowan showed us how if you look at a monkey and bob up and down and from side to side, they do the same back to you.
Every now and again while we are driving we have to stop and walk through a box filled with a wet substance which disinfects our shoes against foot and mouth. Apparently some years ago there was foot and mouth disease here and every cow in the country had to be destroyed, and that's something in a country that has more cattle than people. We have to have at least a second pair of shoes to dibble in the trough; technically we should dunk all our shoes. Cattle aren't allowed to mix with wild animals, if they go into the parks, where elephants have knocked down the fences, they have to be retrieved by the farmer pretty quickly or they are destroyed. The farmer gets compensated by the government.
It's a long day’s drive through the central Kalahari desert region to Khama rhino sanctuary. This was originally a hunting area but the local community set up a sanctuary here for the endangered rhinos as there is a poaching defence post here to help protect the rhinos. Over the 500 kms we see the white sandy soil gradually change to red, more similar to the soil in Malawi.
We make such good time, that we have time for a swim in the pool before our safari drive. There are plenty of white rhinos, they are not white, they are grey, but they were referred to as ’wide mouth rhinos’ as their mouths are adapted for grazing grass, whereas the black rhinos (also grey) have more pointed mouths for eating leaves. A pair of them get quite close and show a little interest in us, but then defecate in sync because we are very near one of their toilet areas. I manage to get the whole procedure recorded. There are also lots of zebras, impala, waterbuck, steenbok,Wildebeest, warthogs and a couple of giraffes.
One of the female rhinos has a tremendously long horn; the males usually have shorter horns as they fight with them and sharpen them on trees, which wears them down. The horns apparently regrow, which suggests that there could be farmed rhino horn, if there was a way of getting the rhino to stand still while one sawed his horn off. Meanwhile poaching still goes on, but a lot less here at this sanctuary.
After our safari drive we have another two-hour drive to Martin’s Drift, near the border with South Africa, and the terrain begins to look quite different, there are hills, some of them really look like a ridge, pushed up out of the surrounding flatness that is the rest of Botswana. The last half hour is in darkness, which can be unnerving as so often there are cows, donkeys and goats wandering across the road.
We spend the night at Kwanokeng Lodge, which overlooks the Limpopo, apparently lower than it's ever been before.
Early next morning we set out for the border post of Martin’s Drift where we have to queue to get out of Botswana, and queue to get into South Africa. If you don't get correctly stamped in or out you can get fined 15 years down the line, according to a story Rowan told. We arrived in Johannesburg about 4pm.
Distance travelled about 2000 kms (1250 miles) over the week in Botswana.
That night, Friday i caught an overnight plane to Heathrow, arriving at 8am Saturday morning.

And now I'm trying to pick up the threads of my life. So far I've enjoyed a bacon sandwich, a prawn baguette, blue vein cheese on crusty bread - some of the things I missed when I was away. Malawi seems distant, but I'll go back next year, for a shorter period, three weeks of building a school with Aidcamp International, then maybe four weeks teaching at M'teza again.

---