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Published: January 15th 2007
I have returned to Maun after my sojourn into the Okavango Delta. After learning and seeing pictures of the Okavango Delta it became one of those places I just had to visit. The Delta is created where the Okavango River decides to battle the Kalahari Desert. The desert wins. The river dies a sandy grave. But in the process, it creates this magnificent wetland area in the middle of a desert. Inside the delta there are areas of permant swamp and annual swamp. Right now is the rainy season so the delta is slowly filling up with water. In April/June time frame the waters will reach their peak. Most of the water in the delta comes from the rains in Angola. It takes several months for the water to fill the delta. Usually sometime after the rains have finished does the water level peak in Maun, at the southern end of the delta. The northern part of the delta is already starting to rise. But here in Maun, there are still lots of islands and dry spots in the delta… but that will change. They say in Shakawe (close to Botswana/Namibia border) the water is at its highest in level in
43 years. Should be a good year for the delta and some of the lakes that haven't had water in years.
January 6:
I'm camped at Mbiroba Camp in Seronga. This camp is run by the Okvango Polers Trust and is in the panhandle of the delta, at the northern fringes. This is significant only because this is my year anniversary of travel, and I'm camped on the fringes of the Okavango Delta. I'm pretty happy and stoked. I was hoping to be greeted with an amazing African Sunset, but instead I got an awesome African thunderstorm. My tent doesn't leak so I was happy about that and the lightning was impressive.
I had made the journey all the way to Seronga to embark on a 4 day mekoro journey. Seronga was chosen for a number of reasons. The two biggest reasons were the cost and the remoteness of the place. Also, Mbiroba and the mekoro's in Seronga are a community project. All the money goes to the local village not foreign hands. This is not true of most of the lodges and camps throughout Botswana.
Before the start of the mekoro trip though I had a
day to explore the village. Not much going on this Sunday. The only reason I really mention this is the camp dog followed me around everywhere. Everyone I met wanted to know my dogs name and where I got him. I had no idea. But he was great, if any cows got in the road he would run ahead and chase them out of the way.
Mekoros are the dug out canoes. Though now they are made of fiberglass to try and save the big trees. Most of the polers like the fiberglass better anyway. Mekoros and poling are the traditional way of getting around the delta. They are used for transport between villages, for fishing, and for tourist trips.
Like I said, I had a 4 day, well really 3 night trip planned. It was very hard for me the first day to just sit in the front of the boat and let the poler, pole the mekoro around the delta.
The mekoro trail follows a series of natural waterways, mekoro made trails and hippo trails. You can usually tell the hippo trail from the mekoro made trail. The hippo trail will be deeper, and sandy
bottom. Surrounding you at all times as loads of hippo grass, papyrus and reeds. In the open lagoons you find day and night lilies.. and hippos so watch out. It is almost surreal to move so slowly and expertly through the reeds. The mekoros move in barely inches of water. (I admit at times I was dreaming of air boating though). One moment you will be surrounded by reeds and grass as far as you can see. Suddenly you are in a lagoon filled with blooming day lillies, and maybe a tree in the distance. If you stand up you can see farther, but it is still just fields and fields of grasses. What you don't see is that most of it is not dry land but water 6-12 inches deep or deeper.
The first day of poling was the longest. We went about 4 hours or so. It would have been less by my guide had to track down another poler in the delta that had his tent. The first night we had a camp visitor. I was sleeping with the fly off my tent so I could look at the stars out my mesh. I wake up
in the middle of the night to the sounds of something shuffling through the grass. I think it is a warthog because it sounds like its snout is moving along the grass. The moon is out so it is pretty bright but I can't see anything outside my tent. So I just lay back down. Suddenly I hear this loud snort/hurrumph. Not 5 meters from my tent is a huge hippo. Luckily he ran the other way. In the morning Gripper (the guide) and I joke about it. He asks me if I heard the lion last night. I hadn't. He says that is strange because it was in my tent.
The 2nd day we went for walks on the different islands. On the one island we came across a nice size group of elephants. I was not happy with my guide at this point in time. We are casually walking through the bush when my guide turns around and starts running. He ran right into me and almost ran me over. So I start running towards a big tree but my guide just keeps running. He was scared because we were too close to the elephant that he
had just seen. We then actually saw several more elephants close by and had to keep moving around. It almost felt like we were being hunted by the elephants or something like that. I wasn't nervous until the guide got nervous.
There seems to be lots of fear in Botswana of elephants. The guide was telling me of a local guy that was killed in October when he surprised an elephant in the bush while looking for cattle. I saw a newspaper article saying the number of elephants in Bots is dangerous. So there you go, maybe we were right to be scared maybe not. It was definitely a different reaction than the one from Casbert on the Zambezi river. But it was a different situation as well.
The afternoon walk brought us several herds of zebras. I liked this more than the elephants. Not sure, I just like zebras better.
When we got back to camp from the 2nd walk though, it was getting late. We had to go and get water and check the fish net. The water in the delta is safe to drink, as long as you don't get it from a hippo
pool. So yes, I drank river water for 4 days and no I haven't gotten sick yet. Coming back from this excursion was interesting and nerve racking. The sun had already set and it was starting to get dark. Darkness wasn't the problem. Hippos were the problem, this is the time of day when they leave the pools and head to land to feed. We actually didn't make it back to camp in the mekoro. We had to stop maybe 100 meters sooner than we wanted and beach the mekoro. There was a pair of hippos that didn't want us going in the channel we wanted. It was no big deal, but interesting.
The other days were really just spent doing more exploring. I learned to pole and poled as most of the last two days. At one point Gripper poled us over the top of a hippo. We heard it in the grass and thought it was a croc. But after we passed over the bubbles of it, Gripper realized it was a hippo. I think we got lucky, but not sure we were in real danger.
What else happened in the delta? Gripper made me a
traditional meal with day lilies and beef and fish. He also taught me how to play Xumu (I can't pronounce it, it is some sort of pucker/clucking sound). Anyway it is a game that reminded me of parcheesy, maybe. It is a game that they play around the cattle station to pass the time. I was quite good at it. At least I won more than I lost, but maybe he let me. There is actually a lot of strategy to the game.
The sunsets in the Delta were nothing short of amazing. Nadene was right, there is nothing more special than an African Sunset. What confuses me though is why is the sunset so much more spectacular than a sunrise. I saw several sunrises on this trip. I even got up and really watched one. It just doesn't seem to linger and produce the colors that a sunset though. The sunrise pre-dawn as the light slowly comes up. There is just a glow in the east. Slowly it gets brighter and brighter. You get some red and orange right along the horizon but it doesn't really reach out into the sky. Then a huge orange ball appears on
the horizon. It seems to take less than 15 minutes from the time you see the first sliver of orange ball until it is a fiery yellow monster, driving you into the shade.
Speaking of shade I did a little temperature experiment. We were sitting in the shade at camp and I was thinking about how cool it was here. I got out my travel clock which has a thermometer on it. It read 30degrees. I then set the clock out on the mekoro in the sun. Five minutes later the thermometer read 51degrees. Needless to say I stayed in the shade as much as possible.
Inside the delta, I was completely lost. Well mostly. At the first campsite I wanted to pitch my tent so it would be on the west side of the tree, so I would get morning shade. So I looked at the sun, made some calculates as to where we came from and pitched my tent. Only to find out later that I got evening shade and morning sun. I was turned almost 180degrees around. Several times on the walk the guide would ask me where the mekoro was. I didn't really know.
I vaguely knew the sort of right direction. Given enough time I might have found it, but I was pretty well turned around. It is easy to get lost. So many of the bushes, reeds, trees, termite mounds all look the same. Very humbling since I usually know my way around after being somewhere once.
Art of Poling
There is an art to poling a mekoro around the delta. I asked once why they pole instead of paddle. The pole because the water is generally too shallow, if the water gets deep then they have to paddle.
I guess the most important part of poling is the pole. The pole we had was about 4 meters long. One end of the pole is forked. The fork is there it keep the pole from sinking in the mud. It creates a larger surface area to push against and helps to keep the pole from getting stuck in the reeds or mud as push along.
Poling isn't as easy as it looks. You want the end of the pole to be behind you when it touches the bottom. Ideally, and this varies with water level, you will grab the pole
at waste level, the forked end at the bottom and you will have 1-2 meters of pole above your hands. If the pole is behind you, then you just walk up the pole and the mekoro moves forward. Then you pick up the pole and do it again. Sometimes when picking up the pole you can swing it around and drop it easily in front of you, letting your hands slide until it hits the bottom. Hopefully, the mekoro has enough momentum to place the pole behind you and you push off again. Sometimes however, the trail is to o narrow. You can only walk back down the pole keeping it along side the boat, to keep it out of the reeds.
Turning is easy one way and hard the other. I poled on the right side of the boat so it was easy to turn to the left… just push off. Turning to the right though, required some kind of funky, draw/C stroke along the bottom, or maybe pushing off the left side of the mekoro. But that didn't always work because if the water was deeper on the left of something it was easy to loose balance as you tried to push off the bottom on the opposite side.
After about 2 hours of poling we had made it back to the mekoro station for our pickup. I got out of the boat and realized that my legs were rubbery. It was lots of work, but good fun. I never fell in.
Animal List for Delta:
Hippos (of course), Elephants, Zebras, Red Leche, Impala, Giraffe track, turtle, warthogs and lots and lots of birds again. I don't know most of the birds, great colors and impressive to watch. Maybe if I had taken bird watching twice in college I would know the birds better… but I didn't so I just enjoyed watching them fly. We also heard some lions.
Tsodilo Hills
My trip to the Tsodilo Hills was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. On leaving Seronga, I had decided to spend a night at Drotsky's Cabins in Shakawe. The next morning I had bummed a ride from an older couple that was headed back to Maun. I was going to be squeezed in the back of a pickup with the luggage, but at least it should be more comfortable and faster than the bus. Just as we were getting ready to leave the Eileen, the owner, came up and said that there was a girl traveling alone that was headed to Tsodilo Hills and then Maun, would I like go with her. I jumped at the chance.
The Tsodilo Hills were a place I wanted to visit, but was going to have to pass on. You can only get there with your own transport. It is 40kms off the main road out into the desert. There are 4 hills of rock that just rise from the desert floor. What makes them so special is the rock paintings that decorate their surfaces. Some of the paintings date back to 800 to 1300 AD. The hills are sacred to the locals. For me they were a rare thing to see. The landscape is so dry and they really do just rise out of the desert floor. I was stoked to get the chance.
Of course the chance didn't have come without a price. We hit mother of a pothole on the road that bent her back rim. Luckily we had a spare tire and it was no to big a problem to change the tire in the hot Botswana sun. On the ride into Maun, we also clipped a cow. We just caught his legs with our front left bumper. No damage to cow or car…very lucky.
Aerial View
The last thing I did with this trip to the delta was take a scenic flight from Maun. I wanted to see the delta from the air. I didn't get any views like you see in the pictures. The biggest thing I noticed was how much drier it was here in Maun than in Seronga. I guess we got lucky because we saw a huge heard of Elephants, maybe 100 of them. We also saw lots of giraffes. My first wild giraffes in Africa.
Delta Pictures
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Ron Smith
non-member comment
My Visit to the Delta
Hi, I am quite impressed with your story and pictures. For many years I did some work in Africa with the RFID microchip identifying threatended animals. I am taking my three grandsons to the Delta next January 2010 with the assistance of a colleague of mine who lives in Joberg. Thanks and regards Ron Smith Australia