Last stop, end of the world: Take a train to the tip of Tierra del Fuego
This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend. See all 21 stories.
Standing at the end of the world felt a lot like home to me. At the train depot, overlooking evergreen forests and a bay of mountains, I stopped to grasp the scene. The piercing morning sun stalked low, out of sight behind the summits of Tierra del Fuego National Park. But for the signposts in Spanish and unfamiliar trees – Magellan's beech, not Atlantic oak – I could have been on Scotland's rugged west coast.
I'd come south – all the way south – to the Argentine city of Ushuaia, at the southernmost tip of South America, in search of epic landscapes, adventure and a historic frontier in train travel. Tierra del Fuego National Park, the shoreline trails of which I was exploring, is home to the 'End of the World' train (El Tren del Fin del Mundo), and it is a fragile leftover from one of the world's most remote penal colonies, of which more later. It also represents a profitable money-spinner for the blossoming tourist industry in this complex region of wild sea channels, twisting fjords and ferocious winds on the borderlands between Argentina and Chile.
For my part, I've had similarly thrilling train experiences across the continent. A journey on the Machu Picchu train 25 years ago in Peru; a rooftop ride on Ecuador's zig-zagging Devil's Nose railway; a sunset visit to Bolivia's 'Great Train Graveyard', near the pearly salt pans of the Salar de Uyuni. But this one on Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego is by far the toughest to get to and so has a particular air of abandon – and freedom.
The irony is that this is the railway line first built in 1909 by convicts as a 24-kilometre freight line to transport materials by steam locomotive between sawmills and Ushuaia prison. As local guide Grisel Guerrero tells it, no one wanted to live in this far-flung region with little or no opportunities in the 1890s. But the overflowing jails in Buenos Aires, nearly 3200 kilometres away, presented the unlikely solution.
'It was our Siberia,' Guerrero told me, while we strolled Ushuaia's waterfront that morning. 'Like the history of the British in Australia, our government formed a penal colony, sending many of the worst offenders here. It would
take up to six months to arrive by ship, so before then it was almost impossible for the Argentinian government to populate this land.'
Surrounded by the Beagle Channel and hemmed in by the Fuegian Andes, the landscape is far more dramatic than Russia's vast and unwelcoming North Asian province. As improbable, hard-to-believe-in places go, it's also worth the expense and time to get to. Lining this largely unpeopled coast are empty beaches and river estuaries teeming with brown trout. There are silvery sawtooth peaks and abrupt glaciers. In such beautiful surroundings, it's small wonder that many prisoners decided to stay after earning their right to freedom. By 1952, following an earthquake and landslide, the train had closed.
These days, the UK-built convict train – revived in the mid-1990s as a heritage railway – wouldn't rival many for glamour. Nor would it match any Tube line in London for efficiency. The distance you travel is only eight kilometres, with one intermediary stop at gently gushing Macarena Waterfall. Besides that, the toy-town-like train takes one hour to reach the end of the line. In Ushuaia itself, the former prison complex, Museo Marítimo y del Presidio de Ushuaia, now charts the intriguing time line of the country's early penal colony.
But the rewards of riding the slowest train in South America are profound. After the clanking of gears, there is the screech of wheels on the 500mm gauge track and the shrill blow of a whistle carried on the wind. The ride from platform to national reserve is admittedly the stuff of a theme park, with staff garbed in cosplay inmate uniforms, but you realise, excitedly, that this is also an invitation into one of the wildest corners of the Americas.
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For me, the highlight was the intricacy of land and sea that surrounded us at journey's end within Tierra del Fuego National Park. On board, you only have to look out of the window to feel awe.
'This is the end of the world for us,' Guerrero told me, upon the train reaching its last stop. 'Some say that's a negative way of describing Ushuaia, so now we also say it's the beginning of everything. South America, the Pan-American Highway, the start of our lives here. There is no shortage of opportunity and adventure.'
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Sydney Morning Herald
19 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Last stop, end of the world: Take a train to the tip of Tierra del Fuego
This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend. See all 21 stories. Standing at the end of the world felt a lot like home to me. At the train depot, overlooking evergreen forests and a bay of mountains, I stopped to grasp the scene. The piercing morning sun stalked low, out of sight behind the summits of Tierra del Fuego National Park. But for the signposts in Spanish and unfamiliar trees – Magellan's beech, not Atlantic oak – I could have been on Scotland's rugged west coast. I'd come south – all the way south – to the Argentine city of Ushuaia, at the southernmost tip of South America, in search of epic landscapes, adventure and a historic frontier in train travel. Tierra del Fuego National Park, the shoreline trails of which I was exploring, is home to the 'End of the World' train (El Tren del Fin del Mundo), and it is a fragile leftover from one of the world's most remote penal colonies, of which more later. It also represents a profitable money-spinner for the blossoming tourist industry in this complex region of wild sea channels, twisting fjords and ferocious winds on the borderlands between Argentina and Chile. For my part, I've had similarly thrilling train experiences across the continent. A journey on the Machu Picchu train 25 years ago in Peru; a rooftop ride on Ecuador's zig-zagging Devil's Nose railway; a sunset visit to Bolivia's 'Great Train Graveyard', near the pearly salt pans of the Salar de Uyuni. But this one on Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego is by far the toughest to get to and so has a particular air of abandon – and freedom. The irony is that this is the railway line first built in 1909 by convicts as a 24-kilometre freight line to transport materials by steam locomotive between sawmills and Ushuaia prison. As local guide Grisel Guerrero tells it, no one wanted to live in this far-flung region with little or no opportunities in the 1890s. But the overflowing jails in Buenos Aires, nearly 3200 kilometres away, presented the unlikely solution. 'It was our Siberia,' Guerrero told me, while we strolled Ushuaia's waterfront that morning. 'Like the history of the British in Australia, our government formed a penal colony, sending many of the worst offenders here. It would take up to six months to arrive by ship, so before then it was almost impossible for the Argentinian government to populate this land.' Surrounded by the Beagle Channel and hemmed in by the Fuegian Andes, the landscape is far more dramatic than Russia's vast and unwelcoming North Asian province. As improbable, hard-to-believe-in places go, it's also worth the expense and time to get to. Lining this largely unpeopled coast are empty beaches and river estuaries teeming with brown trout. There are silvery sawtooth peaks and abrupt glaciers. In such beautiful surroundings, it's small wonder that many prisoners decided to stay after earning their right to freedom. By 1952, following an earthquake and landslide, the train had closed. These days, the UK-built convict train – revived in the mid-1990s as a heritage railway – wouldn't rival many for glamour. Nor would it match any Tube line in London for efficiency. The distance you travel is only eight kilometres, with one intermediary stop at gently gushing Macarena Waterfall. Besides that, the toy-town-like train takes one hour to reach the end of the line. In Ushuaia itself, the former prison complex, Museo Marítimo y del Presidio de Ushuaia, now charts the intriguing time line of the country's early penal colony. But the rewards of riding the slowest train in South America are profound. After the clanking of gears, there is the screech of wheels on the 500mm gauge track and the shrill blow of a whistle carried on the wind. The ride from platform to national reserve is admittedly the stuff of a theme park, with staff garbed in cosplay inmate uniforms, but you realise, excitedly, that this is also an invitation into one of the wildest corners of the Americas. Loading For me, the highlight was the intricacy of land and sea that surrounded us at journey's end within Tierra del Fuego National Park. On board, you only have to look out of the window to feel awe. 'This is the end of the world for us,' Guerrero told me, upon the train reaching its last stop. 'Some say that's a negative way of describing Ushuaia, so now we also say it's the beginning of everything. South America, the Pan-American Highway, the start of our lives here. There is no shortage of opportunity and adventure.'
Sydney Morning Herald
19 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
In a remote snorkelling paradise north of Australia, I see the world anew
This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend. See all 21 stories. Barely the length of a fingernail, Bargibant's seahorses spend their entire tiny lives anchored by their tails to a gorgonian sea fan, cantering gracefully in the warm currents, following a sedate, monogamous existence of male pregnancy and suction feeding. They're so small and so expertly camouflaged – covered in lurid-coloured knobbles, exactly mimicking their home – that no one noticed these pygmy seahorses existed until 1970, when a couple were accidentally unhitched by a marine biologist studying sea fans. Bargibant's seahorses are a minuscule part of the astounding biodiversity of Raja Ampat, an archipelago off remote West Papua, the portion of the tropical island of New Guinea annexed by Indonesia in 1969. Raja Ampat (or Roger's Armpit, as a jokester in my life quipped) is said to have the richest biodiversity of any marine environment in the world, supporting 75 per cent of all known coral species and many still unknown in vast, intact reefscapes fringing 1500 karst islands. The numbers are boggling. On land, 874 plant species, almost a third of them orchids, some 300 bird species, including the rarest of rare birds-of-paradise, and marsupials: echidnas, tree kangaroos and cuscuses (a sub-species of possum) among them. Underwater, more than 1500 species of reef fish and thousands of assorted creatures, from nudibranchs to sea squirts – though, really, who could count? Pull on fins and a snorkel mask and glide over any reef here, and the uncountable numbers are beside the point. I didn't see a Bargibant's seahorse, or even a fraction of the wildlife. The miracle of the seahorse for me, the miracle of Raja Ampat, was not actually seeing it – but being able to see it. The exhilaration of kayaking between jungle islets and snorkelling over teeming reefs was ultimately less miraculous than mustering the courage to embark on such an adventure. This story starts with a seven-year-old girl wearing her first pair of spectacles (pink plastic, chunky lenses already). I still recall the shock when I realised how little I had been seeing, and I felt that jolt every time I got new, thicker lenses as the myopia and astigmatism barrelled along. I wore contact lenses into my 20s, until I developed a reaction to preservatives in the lens fluid, and by my early 30s I was an early adopter of corrective laser surgery, which worked brilliantly – for a decade or so. By then the slow spread of corneal scarring across both eyes had begun, most likely caused by the long-ago contact-lens misfortune and more from the laser. Years later the scarring had become so severe that even the thickest, most specialised optical lenses failed to give me decent vision. The longer I postponed surgery, my doctor kept warning me, the more difficult the corneal scraping operation needed to remove the scars, a procedure known as superficial keratectomy. The longer I waited, the more fearful I became. Slowly, without really noticing, I stopped doing things: driving at night, ordering from chalkboard menus, swimming. I persisted with snorkelling – my great love – by fitting various masks with prescription glass, but they were heavy and slipped and leaked, and so did my confidence. I can't remember when I stopped snorkelling. Long enough that I'd forgotten the adrenaline rush of the first inhalation, the electric volt of liberation from a body weighted in air, the thrill of being just another creature alive in the ocean. Earlier this year, two years after long-delayed surgery on both eyes, I catch a current as swift as an escalator, as warm as a bath. Beside me is a coral garden of barely believable richness and colour, growing on a shelf that slopes gently from a limestone islet, then drops off a cliff into an inky void. Instantly the neighbourhood fish pile onto the escalator with me and together we sweep over a Nemo father ushering his babies into the safety of their anemone home; we fly over Moorish idol couples promenading serenely; watch a riot of Kusama-esque clown triggerfish chase their polka-dotted rivals. As promised, the corals are astounding. Some look fungal, some floral, others look distinctly genital. Many are indescribable. Above the hum of hyperactivity I can hear parrotfish pecking for their dinner. Every creature is furiously occupied: hunting, eating, growing, dying. And every fish, thousands of them, every outlandish coral configuration, every fluorescent colour and psychedelic pattern is sharply defined and miraculously visible – without glasses. Raja Ampat is a holy grail for serious divers ... who dive up to four times a day. I see the world as if for the first time. And this is how I spend the next 10 days in the Coral Triangle: weeping with wonder, euphoric, drenched in sweat or seawater, mind-blown and largely lost for words. Either not myself or the most intense version of myself. Raja Ampat is a holy grail for serious divers, who typically book live-aboard vessels for a week or more and dive up to four times a day at their choice of scores of ocean, reef and drift dive sites. I, too, might have become a diver, but these days I'm grateful to be tank-free. I've always loved the lo-fi simplicity of snorkelling, its lack of pretension and DIY sense of freedom. For the same no-fuss reasons I've taken up sea kayaking, the aquatic version of walking rather than driving or cycling. Like the divers, I'd heard stories of the coral wonderland of Raja Ampat. Imagine, then, the thrill of finding a company* that stages live-aboard kayak-snorkel expeditions, allowing intrepid dawdlers to explore Raja above and below sea level at the pace of someone seeing the world anew. My kayaking buddy and I arrive in the unremarkable provincial city of Sorong, a four-hour overnight flight east of Jakarta, and climb aboard the Jakaré, a handsome 30-metre phinisi, a traditional timber yacht design. 'Hello-'ello-'ello-'ello-'ello!' cries the crew, beaming, and this is the joyful ululation that greets us every time we depart and return on kayaks or aboard Jakaré's Zodiac, used to dart between snorkel sites. There are 10 of us wannabe adventurers and 12 crew, among them our German-Canadian kayak guide, Frank. 'Somewhere between a walk in the park and climbing Mount Everest' is his frequent quip when asked the exertion level of an excursion. His wicked sense of humour is matched by a GPS-sharp sense of direction navigating Raja's labyrinths of islands and lagoons, all the more impressive considering he spends most of his year working in forest restoration in British Columbia. 'This afternoon we're paddling to Dugong Lake,' he says early on, adding cryptically, 'it's not a lake, and there are no dugongs.' It's our introduction to the region's mangrove forests, unlike any I've seen before: vast, wallowing in clear water and rooted in dazzling white sand. We slide over beds of eel grass alive with nursery fish, duck beneath low-slung mangrove branches, twist and turn in single file along serpentine alleys. The air is drowsy with butterflies. Palm cockatoos scream overhead. At the end of a narrow chasm is an S-bend that spits us into a glassy bay full of mushroom-shaped islets, their limestone walls eroded neatly at water level and ringed by colour charts of reef-dappled blue. At a distance these islands are Pixar cartoon characters bristling with mop-head palms and dripping with vines and carnivorous pitcher plants. Look hard, though – there's time to do that under paddle – and each islet is subtly different, some carved into flutes or etched like dinosaur scales and splashed with ochre and black 'graffiti', some shaped like conical hats, others dissolved into chimneys and arches that we glide beneath and between. Though I see only two patches of dead coral, cause unknown, a snorkeller inevitably obsesses about the health of the world's reefs. Raja Ampat sits at the confluence of the Indonesia Throughflow and the great currents of the Pacific and Indian oceans, so along with the nutrient-rich water that fuels the region's incredible biodiversity comes plastic waste and elevated water temperatures. At a time when 84 per cent of the planet's reefs have been affected by the worst global bleaching event on record, scientists warn that even so-called 'thermal refugia' such as Raja Ampat – places with reefs that are flushed by cooler, deeper water that can buffer corals from rising surface temperatures – may no longer be shielded. One day we swim, spellbound, with manta rays, watching as they circle and hover in a queue over underwater pillars. Rising sea-surface temperatures aren't the only cause of coral death; a growing threat in Raja are blooms of cyanobacteria that can smother entire colonies, a threat largely attributed to increased human sewage as tourism has surged in the past five years. I think a lot about the preciousness of what I'm seeing, and I find child-like reservoirs of energy, for there is so little time and so much to see. Days follow a pattern of perpetual motion and jam karet, the useful Indonesian phrase meaning 'rubber time'. Each morning we're anchored in a new spot, from where we head out on two or three kayak outings and a couple of snorkels and pause for feasts of fish, fruit and Indonesian stir-fries and curries. Some days we add a swim in an underground river or hike into a forest to watch birds-of-paradise. One day we swim, spellbound, with manta rays, watching as they circle and hover in a queue over underwater pillars attended by cleaner wrasse, the little fish bartering a gill-cleansing scrub for a free meal of parasites. We paddle with reef sharks and turtles – or were we snorkelling at the time? I start thinking of our sorties as 'kayak-snorkels'; in many lagoons the corals grow so close to the surface and the water has such clarity we don't need to get wet to see their vivid colours and fantastic forms. Loading Then again, we're never dry – tropical cloudbursts open over us, fat raindrops bouncing around our paddles and skin remains clammy day and night. As we plunge deeper into the archipelago the membrane between air and water, kayak and snorkel, reality and dream, begins leaking. The humidity and the temperature are climbing in unison by the time we paddle into Pulau Balbulol in the southern reach of the archipelago, its constellation of conical islands rising 20 metres sheer from iridescent water. Just beneath the surface are clearly visible red corals and shape-shifting shoals of neon damsels. I stir the air, or the water – it's hard to tell – then stop paddling, adrift beneath pink orchids dangling off the walls. The only thing that moves with purpose is a mighty hornbill lifting off from the jungle overhead, noisy as a cargo plane in the prehistoric silence. Meanwhile, life beneath the surface is frenetic. Next morning Jack the divemaster takes a break from the divers and joins the snorkellers. I love his big smile, his daily briefings with hand-drawn maps, his diver's repertoire of expressive hand signals identifying marine creatures. With him we tumble out of the Zodiac into water that seems to fizz. Instantly a current sweeps across the shelf beneath us, ruffling a bed of dusty-pink coral petals, and I'm bobbing alongside fusiliers and angelfish, sweetlips and parrotfish. We nod to each other companionably and keep moving – things to do. I follow Jack's hand signal to a giant clam, pursing its purple lips suggestively as we float by. He mimics a snapping crocodile and, sure enough, there's a large unmistakably crocodile-shaped fish settled almost invisibly into the sand. I'm trying to take all this in – this brilliant technicoloured dream – when the shelf falls away abruptly and a cool current rushes from the deep. It sweeps me up and around a corner blanketed in lacy sea fans and suddenly I'm flying inside a school of tiny shard-like fish, shattering and surging. For a moment my vision dims, eyes filled with tears. Then I blink and I'm seeing the world again, as if for the first time. * Specialist adventure travel and guiding company Expedition Engineering, based on Vancouver Island, Canada, runs a handful of kayak-snorkel expeditions each year in Raja Ampat on the liveaboard yacht Jakaré. The writer travelled at her own expense.
Sydney Morning Herald
19 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Pouncing lions, pronking springboks, poison-arrow lessons: Botswana's safari idyll
This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend. See all 21 stories. In Botswana, they named their currency, pula, after their most precious commodity. Their diamonds? No – it's the rain. The word means 'blessings', too, and perhaps that's hardly surprising given the Kalahari covers 70 per cent of this parched southern African country. The Kalahari, though, is not the endless expanse of sand that might first appear in your mind's eye. And, after this year's especially plentiful rains, the desert is blooming, covered in sweet-smelling flowers and head-high grasses that provide plenty of grazing for wildlife and domestic cattle alike. Pula indeed. Botswana reserves 40 per cent of its land for its wildlife. And in a country that's the same size as France (with a population of less than 3 million), well, that's a lot of land. The approach here, though, is not the mass safari tourism you'll find in many places elsewhere on this continent. Here it's high value, low impact. The camps are on a small scale; there are few with capacity for 30 guests, most have between eight and 12. The atmosphere, then, is an intimate one and, once you're in the bush, it really is just you and the animals. You're not going to be in a crowd of 20, 30, or even 40 other vehicles surrounding a cheetah too distracted by clicking cameras to catch her prey. Over the course of a week's drives, I rarely saw another vehicle except in the distance. In Botswana, you could have travelled back in time to an Africa that Karen Blixen [who wrote Out of Africa ] might have recognised from 100 years ago when she had her farm in Kenya – albeit with guns replaced by camera lenses. The Ker & Downey camps I visited here conjure a certain nostalgia, too. The 'tents' (in practice, huge rooms with an occasional nod in the direction of canvas) offer luxury and comfort: mosquito-netted four posters, Turkish rugs, indoor and outdoor showers, thatched roofs, deep shady verandas. Early morning tea is brought in a pot covered with a cosy. Dining tables are set with napkins in their holders, classic tableware (Blixen brought her Royal Copenhagen porcelain and crystal with her), fine wines and food. Guests gather around a huge fire, dinners are served at long tables where guests and guides discuss the day's adventures. The camps are generally unfenced, and animals wander through at night, hence you are always accompanied by a guide after dark. None of the animals wears a tracking device so you follow the signs (footprints, droppings) and the formidable knowledge of your guide. You are on their territory. The atmosphere is intimate. In the bush, it really is just you and the animals. Maun is not the capital of Botswana (that's Gabarone) but it is the country's safari capital. It has grown exponentially since I was here 20 years ago, but despite having over 80,000 inhabitants, it's still classed as a village – albeit one with an international airport from which tiny light aircraft or helicopters transport travellers to the camps. After 14 hours in the air flying from London, I felt the need to stop off at Grays Eden, a new colonial-style hotel with a beautiful garden that goes down to the river, and a restaurant featuring what you might call 'bush fine dining' (the kudu carpaccio is a speciality). From Maun, it's 25 minutes in a 12-seater known as a caravan over the vast, empty Botswanan plains to Dinaka Camp's airstrip on the Central Kalahari's northern edge. I was met by General, my guide for the next couple of days, who ran me through the rhythm of the day: 5.30am wake-up call; 6am breakfast and game drive; 11am brunch; 3.30pm high tea and the second drive with sundowners in the bush around 6pm; 7.30pm dinner. You can vary this with a bush walk (the only time your guide carries a gun) and they always have a night drive on offer. I spent one afternoon with three bushmen who showed me medicinal plants, how to find water in underground tubers and store it in ostrich eggs, which plants can be spun into rope, and which caterpillars can provide the best poison for arrow tips. With General, I watched young impalas practise their fighting technique, pronking springboks, dozens of iridescent birds, jackal families, oryx, wildebeest and a lone tsessebe (Botswana's swiftest antelope). A pair of lionesses, as pale as the creamy tufts of feathered grasses around them, stalked past our vehicle, a mother teaching her daughter how to hunt. From Dinaka, it's a 'van' (a four-seater light aircraft) followed by a helicopter-for-two to reach the new camp of Maxa in the Okavango Delta, one of the few landlocked deltas in the world. Two million years ago, much of Botswana was a lake, but as the earth shifted and rivers were diverted, less water flowed in and the lake disappeared. However, with the rains and the rivers that flow down from Angola, there is still water here all year round and the Okavango experiences Africa's second-biggest annual migration (after the Serengeti). From the air, what look like fields of grass turn out to be reeds in shallow water. And, sometimes, not-so-shallow water. This didn't stop Shane (guide and co-owner of Maxa) driving through it – though, as the depth changes from day to day, he sometimes gets out, rolls up his trousers and wades through just to check. On my first afternoon, however, he suggested a different form of transport. The mokoro used to be a traditional wooden dug-out canoe but is now, in order to conserve trees, made of fibreglass. Nevertheless, the principle is unchanged. In your small, narrow punt, the poler stands behind you as you glide through the parting reeds, past exquisite water lilies and thumbnail-sized frogs clinging onto the reeds where minuscule spiders weave even tinier webs. In the water, fish dart just below the surface, watched by kingfishers and herons and, in the branches of tall trees, fish eagles patiently wait. Arriving back on dry land, a table complete with flickering candles and ice buckets awaits for the ultimate sundowner (the sky didn't disappoint, a new moon appearing above a flame-red horizon). Maxa faces a lagoon where hippos spend all day groaning, honking and blowing water like freshwater whales as they rise and fall lazily in their pool. There's a human pool here, too, with lagoon water filtered by reeds, a fire pit and a kind of treehouse with platforms, hammocks and far-reaching views. The next morning, Shane led four of us on a bushwalk through the early mist, explaining the skittish zebras and families of reproachful baboons – after more than 20 years without a camp, the animals here aren't yet used to humans. There were signs of elephants but the creatures themselves were elusive – until the next morning. Out on a game drive, we came across a family of females with their young, about 30-strong. This was thrilling enough but as we moved on a young bull elephant appeared. He lowered his head, raised his trunk, flapped his ears ('See how big I am – be very afraid') and approached. Two more arrived in a stately, if rather alarming, parade, coming even closer. Shane was relaxed, telling us, 'You only need to worry if they stop flapping their ears.' Loading Kanana camp is even deeper into the delta and teems with wildlife. Within minutes of starting my first drive, I was at a lagoon full of hippos with a couple of crocodiles on the bank. There was a small herd of buffalo, a pair of ostriches, a giraffe with her days-old calf, a family of hyenas, hundreds of impala and a magnificent lion with a lioness who looked suitably fearsome until they rolled onto their backs, paws in the air. But the highlight? A lioness, saintly in her patience, as her three cubs (about two months old) pounced on her and each other, rough-and-tumbled, stalked flying insects and sat up to box each other's ears. I could have watched them for hours (in fact, I did). It was an intimate moment and one typical of Botswana. There is a freedom here that Blixen would surely recognise. You drive off-road, walk through the bush, sleep on platforms under the stars, fly in aircraft not so very much bigger than Denys Finch Hatton's [Karen Blixen's aristocratic lover]. There are never any crowds – well, except for the impala. It's just you and the wildlife. You could say Botswana is keeping it real. Or you could say it is simply a blessing. Pula.
