KalahariLog

According to the Botswana Minister for Tourism the total number of foreign tourists have been going down. The highest number was about 19,000 in 2001 and the estimates for 2005 were around 14,000. This is not necessarily bad news as Botswana is new to tourism. Nearby Zimbabwe and South Africa developed tourist infrastructure much earlier and on a grander scale. In the late 1980's Botswana decided to go the "low numbers, high cost" route. The #1 attraction in the country is the Okavango Delta, in the tropical north part. This is an incredible place to visit, in no small part due to the "low numbers" part. According to the experts, until about 10,000 years ago there was a sea in the middle of what is now Botswana. As the climate changed and tectonic activity pushed the crust higher the sea dried up. The major source of water, the Okavango river now just disappears in the deep Kalahari sand. On the way there they form the largest inland delta in the world, covering about 15,000 sq.km.

In this vast region there are no hotels, motels, or even towns. All tourists must stay in tented camps (most quite luxurious) which can only be reached by a chartered flight (very expensive). Most of these camps have only a few tents and no permanent structures. The cost for a typical week-long trip start at $1500 per person and go up to tens of thousands of dollars. Having read about this we decided to go a slightly different route. We flew into Maun, the gateway to the delta, and spent 2 nights at the University of Botswana's Henry Oppenheimer Okavango Research Center, or HOORC. Just a few weeks ago they officially opened their tented camp. The costs are a frugal 20Pula per person (about $3) per night for UB affiliated guests and 100Pula (about $16) for the rest. The tents come equipped with beds, sheets, and even have electricity. Water comes from a bore-hole and is safe but definitely not tasty. The walk to the communal bathrooms at night provides a nice view of the Milky Way and a buggy reminder that there are a lot of bugs in tropical Africa.

There are several budget-oriented travel companies in Maun that try to provide a taste of the Okavango Delta experience at slightly more accessible prices. We used one of those, The Bridge, to organize a day trip on a mokoro (a local dugout canoe). The old bridge over the Tamalakane river is about 8km from the HOORC camp and we walked part of the way there until a comby picked us up. We arrived there around 7am, had breakfast and hopped in a motorboat at 8am. The boat delivered us at the mokoro poler's village at 9am where we aboard the mokoro of Gaolatswe who calls himself Galaxy for the benefit of tourists who can't wrap their tongues around local names.

Mokoros are very popular with tourists but that has resulted in most of the hardwood trees being chopped down for the purpose of making mokoros. Only four trees are suitable for making mokoros and at best one mokoro comes out of one chopped down tree. It takes one of the these trees 20-30 years to reach the size needed for the canoe and it takes just a few weeks to hollow the trunk out and make a mokoro that will last 8-10 years. There is an increasing number of fiberglass mokoros and Gaolatswe's was one of those. He told us that some tourists complain that it is not authentic and demand a real one -- we were quite happy with it.


Gaolatswe took us about 2 hours upstream to an island in the delta. Along the way we saw a herd of zebras and countless water lilies. He told us that he never went to school but learned English from the kids of an Australian couple that lived close to where he grew up. His conversational English was as good as most Batswana I know, and he knew all the plants and animal tracks too. After the walk, a picnic lunch and a short rest, we headed back to the mokoro village and eventually back into town by 5:30pm. This was as good an introduction to the region as I had ever hoped.