Thursday, February 4th - Ghanzi, Botswana

I have mentioned lately that I hate camping?  Well, let me say it again.  I hate camping.  It was a lovely night and very warm so I slept without a sheet or anything for most of the night.  The mattress was thin and with only a sheet on it I felt every root and rock below me.  I did sleep but it was not very comfortable.  And getting up when you have a leg cramp is a real pain in a tent where you really can't stand up in in the first place.

Then about 3 I had to go to the bathroom.  The instructions were to just go behind the tents and stay close to the camp unless you really had "serious business" to do and then you could use the toilet.  I didn't figure mine was too serious so I had to get out of the tent - that in itself was a struggle for me since the zipper at the bottom was really about 8" off the ground so I had to duck out of the tent and step up at the same time, which is a bit much to ask of a person at 3 in the morning.  Oh, and you had to be watching for obstacles lIke tent poles and animals while you were doing it.  Needless to say, I didn't go too far into the bush behind our tent! 

The wake-up call came at 5:30 with breakfast at 6:00 an departure at 7:00 (was more like 7:30) after taking down the tents and packing everything up and loading everything back on the canoes for the 1-1.5 hour ride back.

The canoe ride or should I say Mokoro ride back was very peaceful.  (I do have to stop though and say that the Mokoro is not normally capitalized.  However, the only way I can get the iPad to leave it as Mokoro and not change it to Motorola is to capitalize it!  Sometimes this automatic correction stuff is really annoying.)  Anyway, the ride back was beautiful with some wonderful dawn reflections in the calm water where we had large open areas.  The rest of the trip was going through short grasses or tall reeds so all I got there was a lot of wet reeds and spider webs across my face as I was in the front of the first canoe.  The water lilies were just opening and there were lots of birds along the shore and in the reeds, and one flew over us with a snail in its mouth.  There were also a few hippos but they were far away on the distant shore.

Once back on solid land we waited for truck, reloaded it and were on our way about  9:30.   We retraced our steps along the very bumpy road out of the area for 45 minutes to an hour, and then took another 15 minutes or so to get back to our last hotel on the main road.  There we had to pick up our luggage (could only take small bag with us on camping trip),reload our bus and then on our way.   We stopped in town for lunch and supplies an hour later.  I bought some chicken pieces and ice tea at the grocery store and ate them on the bus as we drove along.  It was a delicious picnic, albeit a bit bumpy on some of the roads.

We made another bush stop along the way and arrived at our resort just before 5 p.m.  This was the night we were supposed to sleep in bushmen huts but I just wasn't feeling up to it.  My allergies were acting up while camping the day before and I didn't get a lot of sleep that night.  I was in the back of the bus again for the drive during the day and it was really bumpy so I had to take a gravol, which always makes me sleepy.  The thought of sleeping in a dusty thatched reed hut, which was going to make me sneeze even more, just did not appeal to me.  For an extra $25 I could have a chalet so that's what I did.  It was my night to be on my own so it was a real luxury.  There were windows on three sides of the chalet so a nice breeze kept it cool.  The bathroom was huge and did at one point have a tree in but now it was just a hole in the tiles.  The bathroom alone was probably 12 X 12 ' with the one half covered and the other half open.  The shower, sink and toilet were on the covered side.  There was a clothes line across the middle so I did some laundry and hung everything up to dry - no problem with that since it's so hot and dry here.

We had dinner at 7:00 and it was great with rice, roast potatoes, chicken, cooked vegetables, salad, beets and a sauce to go with the rice, potatoes and chicken.  I only took a bit of that to start but had to go back for more.  I have no idea what it was but it was good.  Dessert was fruit salad, from a can but still tasty. 

After dinner we had a show by a group of bushmen.  The ladies, about 5, basically sat around the fire clapping their hands and chanting while the men danced with their ankle/calf strings of shells making a tambourine sound.  They just took very tiny steps but stamped their feet down in rhythms to get the sound of the shells  as a rhythmic percussion..One of the two men also sang sometimes during the songs.  He did the initial welcome so I think he must be the head one of the group.  The songs were not your typical African sounds.  It was more like chanting than singing and parts of it were very off tempo and very discordant like they were fighting each other in what they were singing.  I didn't find the songs particularly enjoyable from a musical point of view but they were interesting.  Most of the songs were about animals and hunting but then they did a couple just to entertain us.  In one song about a python the interpreter for us actually had a fake Python that he pulled along the ground with a string.  There reactions at the sighting of the python were pretty funny, especially the main guy.  The whole group wore animal skins and looked very authentic.  

Their show ran from 8 to 9 and shortly after that everyone was in bed.  It had been a long day after our early wake-up call and we had an even earlier one coming the following morning.  I downloaded some pictures but that was all I accomplished before giving in to a well-deserved sleep.