New Year's Eve in Botswana - Rescued from Disaster in Moremi National Park

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Botswana is all about high end tourism. Low volume, high cost. As a park ranger later explained when we ended up sleeping on the floor of his hut after being rescued from disaster for the second time, it’s better for the environment to have 10 tourists paying $1000 a day than 100 tourists paying $100. In theory, I admire the logic of this approach. It seems to be working well for them. Less so for us. We are very much not their target market.

It’s a tough country to do on a budget, even with your own car and tent. We’d heard confusingly mixed things from other travellers. People who can afford it think it’s amazing. People who can’t think it sucks. We initially decided to just drive through, spend as little money as possible and try to push on to South Africa, but at the last minute Sam developed a sudden irresistible compulsion to see Moremi National Park. By this point I was worried we were developing a Safari addiction, a kind of ruinously expensive leopard habit. But Moremi was a place I had recently heard a South African couple dreamily describe as “the garden of eden”, so when Sam found a public campsite (in amongst the $500 all inclusive luxury lodges) for only 30 Pula, I didn’t take much convincing. We were going to do one last safari, as a special New Years treat.

We left Zambia at 6am on New Years Eve, aiming to travel around 600km to Moremi before dark. The main roads in Botswana are a joy compared to other places we’ve driven in Africa, and aside from me earning an absolute bollocking at a police roadblock, the first part of the journey was uneventful. Helpful tip - in Malawi and Zambia you drive casually up to a roadblock (this may be a stick balanced on some barrels), slow down a little, smile hopefully and they mostly just wave you through. Stopping is kind of optional. Roadblock in Botswana unequivocally mean STOP and if you do not STOP then the police lady will shout. I have been lucky behind the wheel, much luckier than Sam. This was my only problematic encounter with police aside from in Kenya, where they threatened to arrest me for terrible parking.

The roads deteriorated as we got past Maun, out towards the Okavango Delta and the vast swathes of the country designated as protected wilderness. Still, the guard at the South Gate of Moremi assured us that even though rainy season had just kicked off with full force, the road should be ok. I can’t imagine what possessed him to say this. Perhaps he owns shares in the local breakdown company. In any case, he was quite mistaken. Fast-forward a few hours, and the car is half submerged in a deep pool of floodwater in the middle of a sandy track. We were completely sunk and immobile. We’d made it through 29km of similar watery obstacles since entering at South Gate, but this one concealed some kind of lurking submerged boulder that we hit unexpectedly, stalling the car in deep water. We just couldn’t get her started again. We had come dangerously close to getting stuck on a pretty much weekly basis during this trip, but Sam always saves it somehow, so I couldn’t believe it had finally happened for real. We checked our GPS (and by GPS I mean pre-loaded Google Maps on a budget second-hand smartphone). We were, it would seem, only just over 1km away from our campsite at North Gate. Now we had a dilemma. We could hear the ominous sound of water trickling through the car in unknown places. We’d passed no other vehicles on this road for hours, presumably because nobody else was stupid enough to try it. We had GPS, but no phone signal. Nobody knew where we were, and no one would notice us missing. It was 17:30, meaning we had around one hour of daylight remaining.

Sam, who had far more financial and emotional interest in the survival of the car, argued that we should get out, grab a couple of big sticks and leg it through the perilous wilderness full of marauding carnivores to North Gate, where we could get help.

I argued that this is exactly how you earn yourself a Darwin Award, and surely it would be better to just wait here, spend the night in the car and hope someone passes this way tomorrow.

You can probably guess who won. I comforted myself with the thought that should I survive, it ought to at least make quite a good blog entry.

We agreed that whatever happens, we were sticking together. Despite our situation being at least, according to my calculations, 85% Sam’s fault since it was all his idea and he was driving, I reassured him that there’s no one else I’d rather be stuck in a terrifying lion infested swamp with. Aside from maybe Bear Grylls, or a mechanic.

In defence of our decision, it wasn’t quite as insane as it sounded. We could see from the map that it was only a 20 minute walk down what appeared to be a clearly marked road. There also seemed to be a small village just outside of North Gate, so though we were in a national park, we reasoned it couldn't truly be an uninhabitable wilderness where anyone who steps outside their vehicle is instantly taken out by predators.

We ran through our big cat, elephant, buffalo and hippo drills, mentally reviewing all the received wisdom we’d accumulated from guides and local friends. It mostly boils down to never ever run from lions, or any other predators, because their instinct is to chase, and you will not win. Keep eye contact and stand your ground, even if they run at you, then back away slowly. Most animals will fire a warning shot before they really attack. Don’t get between hippos and water, then if they charge move sideways or get behind something, because hippos don’t corner well. Carry a stick to make yourself look bigger. Basically, don’t panic. Easier said than done. After scanning the immediate area for anything that might trample or savage me, I cautiously cracked open the car door and slid up to my knees in the murky water. We said goodbye to Niko (the car) and all our worldly possessions, promising we’d be back to rescue her soon, then set off at a pace we deemed to be brisk but not panicky. The fallen branch I selected to carry as my defensive weapon turned out to be a poor choice, being rotten and covered in biting ants.

I was suddenly hyper aware of every little quiver in the bushes. We’d been hanging around in various African countries for five months by this point, and spent a lot of time animal spotting. Believe me, there is a difference between looking out for leopards because you want to photograph them, and looking for leopards because you have legitimate reason to believe they may attempt to eat you. I have never been more alert or awake. Mercifully, aside from stumbling upon some startled impala, which still ranks as one of the most terrifying moments of my life to date, the walk was uneventful.

I have no words to describe the look the park ranger gave us as he caught us marching briskly up to the gate, dripping wet and wielding large sticks. Mine was actually so rotten it had disintegrated almost completely, leaving me clutching a soggy brick sized lump of wood which I was strangely reluctant to part with.

This park ranger was our guardian angel. He’s probably already my favourite person of 2014, and it’s only January 1^st. He hopped in his landcruiser, yanked Niko out with some difficulty, took a look at the engine and then towed her to the gate, where we failed to get her started. At this point we were still hoping, against all common sense and basic mechanical knowledge, that she might somehow be fine after she dried out a bit.

Stuck at the gate on New Year’s Eve with a non-functional car complete with several inches of dirty water sloshing around in the footwells, we assumed we’d had our fair share of bad luck for the day. Then it became apparent that the campsite we booked didn’t exist. The day before, Sam had called the Botswana Wildlife Authority number to book a public campsite he’d read about in a hopelessly out of date guidebook. The book stated the cost would be 30 Pula. They transferred him through to another number, without warning that the campsite had since been acquired by a private company. When Sam asked the price and they said 50 each, he assumed they meant Pula. In fact they meant 50 US dollars, a price hike of around 300%. The park ranger patiently explained all this to us, adding that we were in a very expensive area and there was nothing cheaper for 25km. Seeing the look of despair on our grubby little faces, he offered to let us camp for free in the mechanics yard by the gate, next to our poor broken down car. He is truly a hero for allowing this, since sleeping anywhere other than permitted camps inside a national park is completely illegal, but he reasoned that since we’d broken down we couldn’t make it to the campsite anyway, though it was barely 500m away.

So the rangers went back to the village for the night and we set up our tent, started a thrillingly illegal campfire, cracked open some terrible New Years Eve wine and made ourselves at home. Then we heard the lion. We know exactly what they sound like now, after the incident at Kafue. We both ignored it the first time. At the second roar, much louder and closer, Sam sighed and said “I’ll get the wine, you go sit in the car”. We have a well rehearsed lion in the campsite drill now. This was the first New Year’s Eve I’ve gone to bed sober, and long before midnight.

Later Sam woke me, talking in his sleep. He does this a lot, and it’s really disconcerting. He’ll suddenly sit bolt upright, stare directly at me and exclaim something utterly deranged like “let’s carry it across the border in a bucket!”. This time he said “where are the others? I’d better go and find them”, then started fiddling with the zip on the door of the tent. I jumped up and tackled him to the ground, which he did not seem to think was justified. We then had the following conversation.

Sam: “Are we in the tent?”

Jen: “YES!”

Sam: “Oh. Where are the others? Are they outside?”

Jen: “WHAT OTHERS? THERE ARE NO OTHERS OUTSIDE. LIONS ARE OUTSIDE. ONLY LIONS.”

Sam: “Oh”

Sam settled instantly back to sleep. I spent the first hours of 2014 lying wide awake, listening to the lions roar and staring at Sam to make sure he wasn’t going to sleepwalk outside in his underpants and get mauled.

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Photos

Great roads, still some issues with other road users.

Then things got silly.

Sam definitely now has hookworm

These were the only creatures we came across during our dash for the gate. Obviously I didn't take this photo at the time as I was too busy trying not to shit myself.

Comments

[RENanDREW]

Worms!
Even before I read your caption, my first thought was 'worms!' :)

[D MJ Binkley]

Fantastic blog for the ages
This is one of those stories you will repeat for decades. Glad it turned out well and you were assisted by a nice person. So many more wonderful people in the world than bad people.