Pouncing lions, pronking springboks, poison-arrow lessons: Botswana's safari idyll

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

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.'
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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.