Beautiful Botswana

I know I keep saying this, but it may be possible that I have enjoyed Botswana the most out of all of the countries we have visited. We came in through the Zambezi Ferry border crossing from Zambia after leaving Livingstone and Victoria Falls. The crossing set the tone for the entire trip – the Zambezi was blue and beautiful, and the ride from the border to our first stop, Kasane, was surprisingly expensive.

These are probably my two greatest impressions of Botswana – exceedingly beautiful and unexpectedly expensive. Botswana is both the Africa you imagine, and the Africa you don’t. It has all the big game you can think of, from elephants to hippos to crocs to lions to wilderbeast to rhinos. It has those cute little fellas made famous by Timon from the Lion King, meerkats. Then there are the famous trees – those acacias that grow like umbrellas, and the huge baobab trees that dominate the savannahs. You can also find those typical tall grasses, where entire prides of lions can hide, and wide, wild rivers where herds of elephants and zebras and other animals come down to drink. Then there are the deserts, the wide open expanses of what seem like barren land, and of course the inland delta – unlike virtually any other place on earth – where rivers come to end not in an ocean but in the dry dusty Botswanan desert. Everyone from Kenya onwards always said the Delta was worth going to, and I could not agree more. I was stunned at how different the place was from anywhere I’ve been before, and how alone I felt, even next to an air strip. With no other guests there, our camp provided us with virtual solitude whenever we wanted it, and the game walks felt like a real safari. Likewise, the rides in the wooden dugout boats called mokoros were more than peaceful – they were serene (although having hippos exhale in the water a hundred meters away was downright frightening.)

Perhaps one of my most vivid memories from the entire trip will be spotting my first and only leopard on Chief’s Island. We were ending our last game walk, tired and essentially done with trying to see any big game, when I saw a brownish blur streak past on our left. I yelled out to our guide, Kagiso, in time for him to see a tail. He turned to me, a bit confused, and said, “what did you think that was?” I said, “I don’t think it was an impala, but I’m not sure,” afraid to utter what I really thought for fear of it being untrue. We sat there and weighed the options for a few moments, when suddenly the vervet monkeys in the trees ahead of us started calling out in alarm. Kagiso immediately broke into a sprint, motioning for us to follow him – “it was a leopard!” he shouted. We then ran through the bush, jumping over fallen trees, stepping in puddles, and flattening grass underfoot, shedding all pretense of being quiet. In the end, we did not see the leopard again, but the chase and my fleeting glance of that gorgeous and graceful bounding animal is more than enough to etch the event in my long term memory.

Cost wise, I think we spent more there, on average, per day, in our week there than we spent anywhere else. Everything, from food to transport to package tours were quite expensive, with the Okavango Delta costing us more money than I am even comfortable sharing. Yet, the standards in Botswana are also high. The Chobe Safari Lodge, recommended to us by a wonderful self-safari’ing Swiss couple we met in Malawi, was true 4-star quality, complete with pretty swimming pool, outdoor bar, and a 25 USD a person dinner buffet (that looked really amazing.) We stayed there for two nights when we first got into Botswana, and while we were relegated to eating cheap supermarket hot deli food in the lobby – it was still pretty nice. We did splurge at Planet Baobab, a camp and lodge in the center of the country, just outside of Gweta. It was quite a production getting there – about 6 hours on the back of a freight truck in the burning sun, but once there, I treated myself to what probably was one of the best hamburgers I’ve ever eaten, and for just over 10 USD (better even than my 50 dollar Burj al Arab hamburger!) Even our Okavango trip, done at the cheapest Lodge in the inner Delta, was really comfortable and of a high quality. The food they prepared there was really gourmet, and after a month of ugali and beans, it was really a welcome change of pace.

I think that because Botswana is really geared towards western tourists, they have worked hard to ensure that their standards are high enough to meet expectations. Of course, it does not hurt that essentially all of the lodge owners are foreigners themselves and know well themselves the level of service and experience they are aiming for. This of course is the saddest part of Botswanan tourism – the fact that essentially, no average Botswanans will ever be able to afford to go to a place like Chobe, the Nxai Salt Pans, or the Delta. Especially the Delta. The only Botswanans who have seen the inner Delta are the people who are working there, employees of the park service, or people who were born there. For basically everyone else, the hundreds of dollars a night of lodging is completely out of reach. This makes Botswana an ideal place for (rich) people to get their first taste of Africa and near guaranteed sightings of the big five mammals, but it also speaks volumes to the problems with having western-centric tourism be one of the leading sources of income for a country. There is so much that should be changed about how the entire system is (and how little benefit most Botswanans get from it) but would the country be better off without tourism? Very likely not, but I do wish that tourism could do more for Botswanans than it does now.