Can't believe it is September already and I'm still trying to publish something I wrote in June. A little because I lack motivation and a lot because of the power outages the whole country has been suffering (the subject of a whole other post, probably more). Finally, here you are.
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Zambia has two bank holidays in May. The
first one, always the 1st of May, Labour Day celebrates the achievements
of workers. The second is 25th May, African Freedom Day, the
anniversary of the foundation of the Organisation of African Unity, now
the African Union. Our little family, friends Leah and Fiona and Fiona’s
housemate-for-the-summer Katy, made use of the second long weekend to trot down
to Livingstone and safari in Chobe National Park, Botswana.
Actually I am more
interested in anthropology than big animals, and there was plenty, even on
safari, for me to observe. Coming up to the border we saw the two-mile
line of lorries parked at the side of the road waiting
to cross the river into Botswana. They wait for two weeks or maybe
more to pass from one country to the other to take all manner of goods. It is the
same at most borders across Africa for commercial goods and certainly explains
the exceptionally high cost of imported goods within Zambia (which is pretty much everything since there is little industry). How different it is in
the European Union, borders being mere inconveniences to goods being
transported around the continent.
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| Lorries waiting to cross the border at Kasangula, Zambia |
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| Our taxi making its way past the waiting lorries to the border post |
Botswana touches Zambia at one narrow point of the Zambezi with Namibia and Zim lying to the west and east.
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| Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, Zim border point |
The border crossing is quite a heavily trafficked exit and entry point for goods vehicles. To any efficiency driven, right minded person the most sensible option would be a bridge but instead there is a ferry crossing. I'm not sure what I was expecting at the border but for sure
it wasn't this one vehicle ferry that we were met with. I asked our taxi driver Obey (we've got to know him very well over 3 visits now) why there was no bridge and he muttered darkly about Mugabe not wanting a connection to Zambia so close to Zim.
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| Zambia Botswana border crossing Kasangula Ferry, one lorry at a time |
Foot passengers take a small
outboard motorboat crossing in no time at all. There’s no particular reception point for foot passengers on
either side, just a couple of muddy steps. Luggage that you arrive with is thrown from the boat to the
waiting guides.
The difference between
Botswana and Zambia is immediately obvious as you start to drive from the ferry
point towards Chobe National Park.
The roads feel better quality (better surface, if I remember from my
transport lectures, the layers are thicker and the tarmac is better quality),
they have road markings down the middle and the edge, cats eyes and road signs
just like in the UK, weirdly enough.
I wonder if the AA make signs for Botswana too…do they still make them? And there’s visibly less clutter in
terms of signs, no advertising hoardings, just useful signs.
We had lunch at the safari cafe and discovered we couldn't pay for the trip in Kwacha, it had to be Pula or USD, neither of which we had. The situation was resolved by a lengthy discussion with the young lady taking payments. We persuaded her to try the credit card machine. She was convinced it didn't work but found that if she switched it on, it did. How about that!
The first part of the safari was a cruise west along the Namibia-Botswana
border. There
were the usual fish eagles, crocs, hippos, zebras and joy of joys elephants in huge
numbers. They are quite something
when they wade through the water all holding the tail in front and using their
trunks to snorkel once they start swimming.
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Elephants know no borders, crossing the Zambezi from
Botswana to the Namibian Caprivi Strip |
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| The Matriarch leading the crossing |
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| Buffalo resting with his egret friend |
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| Zebra and waterbuck |
We went on a safari
drive, to see even more animals, giraffes, warthogs, zebra, impala, a family of
very contented lions having feasted on a dead elephant and over 50 different
sorts of birds including lilac-breasted rollers. The dead elephant we were told had died of old age. Coming from the windward side we
couldn’t smell a thing, it wasn’t until we got to the leeward side that we really
knew this beast had been dead for a couple of weeks – goodness me, the hum!
Like an exceedingly over-ripe Camembert cheese. Another interesting point was
that the whole of the head had been burned away as soon as it was found to
make sure poachers did not get the ivory from its tusks. So the lions were
gorging themselves on roast elephant. On the drive back to camp we spotted a black mamba, my first snake in the wild. I couldn't believe how long and fast it was. It came alongside the vehicle for a short while with its head held about a metre from the ground, then it disappeared into a tree. Very glad the vehicle was high up and we could have driven off fast if the need arose.
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| Roast elephant feast |
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| Bloodied faces and big bellies |
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| Giraffe posing for the shot |
Then back to camp, and
really it was the most luxury camp I’ve been on (I suppose Duke of Edinburgh
and cadet camping were never about to be luxury, my reference point is low). The beds were comfortable, the fire hot and bright, the food
second-to-none and the ablutions fun (shower in the sun – who wouldn’t want
that!), and long drop loos.
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| Camp with ablutions basin |
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| Callum making good use of the hot water |
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| The shower! |
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| Chairs around the campfire - I forgot to get the campfire in the pic |
We got talking to some
super interesting people on the breaks from safari at camp. One girl is doing a PhD in food security
to try and understand why some many poor African women are fat but in the same
family the children and the man will be thin. It is a question I have wanted to understand and it seems
no-one does, yet. All they know at
the moment is it’s something to do with the way women store fat.
On our return from Chobe we
stayed in Livingstone again (as we did in March and have done since in July) at
the Tabonina Inn. The baboons were
the same (give them a wide berth, yukky creatures digging through their own and
other animals’ poo, pretty aggressive too), but the falls were even fuller than
in March just at the end of the rainy season. All the rivers from western
Zambia and quite a lot from central and eastern Zambia including the Kafue and
the Luangwa feed into the Zambezi so it takes a while for the rain from the catchment to flow into the Zambezi. The
spray was quite spectacular, even from close to the railway bridge into
Zimbabwe some 500m away we were getting wet.
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| Victoria Falls in full flow |
[If the different mixture of different text fonts and styles disturb you as much as they do me, then know that I have spent at least an hour trying to correct it with no success. Mindful of Freakonomics advice "know when to quit", I have just let it go. Almost right will have to be enough!]
