We arose at 5:00am on Sunday to meet our pickup to Makwena Lodge in the Okavanga. Actually the Lodge is on an island at the edge of the Delta at the southern end of the panhandle as we found out when we saw the map. And on our flight we learned we had seen only a tiny, albeit very representative, portion of the Okavanga. Willi met us at Etsha 6, a sleepy run-down village. We loaded the gear and food we would need for a couple of days into his Land Rover Defender, locked the rest in our truck, and started on the 1½ hour trip to meet our makoro guide.
A word about our gear. As Connie explains, the gear we brought to Africa is a subset of our ‘stuff,’ our possessions. What we took on the road is a subset of the Africa stuff and what we carried to Makwena and the Delta is a subset of that. It takes a lot of planning or you face going cold, hungry, and/or stinky. But it’s only for a few nights!
The trip to the lodge could be made only by the classic African beast of burden, the 4X4 Land Rover Defender; ugly, noisy, dented, smelly, uncomfortable (especially riding in the back on the gear), cold, slow and virtually unstoppable. It took forty-five minutes to drive through hub deep sand to where we transferred the gear and our own selves to an outboard safari barge for the 15 minute ride to Makwena where we met Emma, Willi’s wife. After a pee break we got back in the boat for another half-hour cruise through the papyrus-lined channels to the makoro landing. The ride was African Queen meets Indiana Jones with a little Walt Disney Jungle River Cruise thrown in. Tom, our driver, pointed out birds, hippos, pied kingfisher nests, flooded farmer’s villages as he negotiated hairpin turns on a stream barely wider than his 20 foot barge. How he learned the route is beyond me.
We once again transferred our gear, this time to Alco’s makoro, a fiberglass version of the hand-hewn wooden canoe. The government subsidizes the new models which are molded with imperfections so they look like wood from a distance. This will help preserve the ebony and sausage trees. Besides, they don’t leak and are lighter and easier to pole along.
Alco poled us from the stern through the shallow Delta, often eschewing the channels for the quieter grass flats. From our vantage sitting on the floor (thank goodness for Crazy Creek chairs) it was sometimes hard to tell that there was water except for the thousands of water lilies and acres of white water lettuce. Alco’s English, which he learned from his brother (a guide at Chobe) who went to school, is good and so was his knowledge of Delta flora and fauna, especially the birds. Over the next two days we saw red lechwe, bushbuck, elephant, spotted-neck otter and water mongoose plus the ubiquitous baboons and vervet monkeys. Our favorite birds were the malachite kingfisher, little bee-eater, African jacana, saddle-billed stork, and spur-winged goose.
At our request Alco took us to Jao, his village of 300 poeple. The men are fisherman or mokoro guidesand they sell their catch to Etsha 6. The women do their domestic stuff, weave beautiful baskets and tend the sheep. Christina, Alco’s girlfriend and mother to his son Tutu, is the village baker. She bakes in a cast iron pot and we bought some rolls from her. Alco said he doesn’t have enough money to marry her. He has been a head mokoro guy for 10 years and would love to leave the water and become a truck driver. Tutu will start school next year but must live with his grandparents in Etsha because it is much to far to commute. Alco thinks his son will abandon the village and is glad because, “he deserves a life”.
We set up camp on a small island– our tent and his blankets and mosquito net, our gas stove and his wood fire, our pasta and his smoked fish and mealy meal. But we shared a love of the Delta, the birds, the stars and the solitude – plus some hot chocolate before bed. The only sour note – and a loud one at that – was a tour group of seventeen 20-somethings in six mokoros about a kilometer away, partying on their own island. Sound really travels over water.
As planned we got up at 6:30 am and after a quick cup of tea, headed off to hike on a larger island. The sunrise over the Okavanga was spectacular and as we slithered through the grassy flats in our mokoro, startled red luchee (similar to red hartebeest) pranced and splashed noisily ahead of us. On the island we saw ebony and sausage trees, the palms the women use for baskets, wild sage, wild camphor, sycamore figs, baboons, numerous birds, and elephant and lion tracks. The elephants had recently gone through the area and it looked like it had been bombed. They just push a tree over if they can’t reach the tender leaves. The days in the Delta are filled with the w-a-a-op the Gray Lourie and the clack-clack-scree-e of the Swamp Boubou – a sound like a rusty gate closing. At night it’s the tap-tap-bang of the Blacksmith Plover, evoking visions of the village smithy at his anvil. And behind it all is the incessant cooing of the doves and the grunts of the hippos.
After breakfast we took down the tent and poled back to our pickup point. We arrived a little early so Connie and I continued to read our Shakespeare until the noisy group of 17 arrived from their island. We are much too old and non-gregarious for that kind of a trip but they saw a much of the same southern Africa in 21 days for only $1100. The dynamics of the group would be interesting to chart – like Survivor except that these outcasts continue to remain with the group.
We coaxed our way onto the cargo boat with “Bones” so we wouldn’t have to listen to the kids. On the way back we stopped to watch the hippos and finally saw more than ears and noses. There were 10 or 12 of them and I think one pair was mating. Then we fed two African Fish Eagles. As we reached shore Connie hopped off into the water to ask Willi if he could put us on the other side of the camp from the group. Everyone gasped as she plunged up to her waist. The Delta is full of giant crocodiles! Who knew? 