Kasane and Chobe National Park (Pictures!)

July 14th, Day 33

We finally had a rest day in a beautiful safari lodge, but rather than catch up on sleep we decided to wake up for the 5:45 am game drive. They said early morning is the best time to see the big cats, and my brother was quite eager to catch sight of a lion. The drive, however, proved to be a rather major disappointment. Not only did we not see any lions or leopards, but we also saw very few other animals. The only redeeming feature was that I got to sit shotgun and have some rather interesting chats with the driver.

He seemed to be only his early 40’s or so, but explained to me that he had grown up in a very different world than the current Botswana. He was from a small tribe some 500 kilometers away from Kasane that had survived by the “old” way of life. He explained that when he was a child there was a different sort of respect between the animals and the people. The lions and the Black Mamba’s respected humans then and people respected the animals so it was always safe. His people survived by growing some food and herding cattle, and he told me about his long treks as a child when he would take the cattle all the way from his small village to Kasane to trade them for other goods. The trek would take many days, and it was through heavily lion infested country. While they encountered lions, they never had any trouble with them. Now, he said, everything was different. His people’s old village had completely changed. People left to get jobs and try to survive in the modern way of life; their land having been altered by modernization to the point in which their old lifestyle was unsustainable. Also, they used to survive off of killing elephants. They would take the neurotoxins from Black Mamba venom glands and put in on the tips of their spears. These neurotoxins would cause the elephants to slowly paralyze and then die, and then the village would strip the elephant of all of its parts. Now, he explained, these actions were illegal as the government highly regulated the hunting of elephants.

His tale was a bit said, but the tone of our chat changed towards the end of the drive. As we were leaving the park we noticed some Zebra down in a clearing. However, rather than immediately drive towards them he nonchalantly asked if we wanted to go back and look at them- it seemed like he wanted to finish the drive and go home. Since we had not seen Zebra yet, we told him that we would like to go. He turned off the road grudgingly and took us to see the Zebra and then exclaimed, “You are lucky, you know, this is the first time we have seen them all year!” Confused about the whole experience, I thanked him, and then we continued with the ride home during which he told me all the intimate details of his unsuccessful love life as well as extremely personal facts about a co-worker at the safari lodge’s most personal life stories regarding his mental health history along with his full name. The whole conversation seemed to follow the course of his life, at first it was pure and simple, and now it was confusing and a bit awkward.

Later that evening we decided to take a boat cruise down the Chobe river in order to get up close and personal with some crocs and hippos. The boat driver, as fate would have it, turned out to be the same guy as on the morning game drive. I decided to sit on the far side of the boat from him. We had a magnificent tour and saw countless hippos and crocs, but the real highlight was when at the very end we managed to see a herd of elephants swim across the river just in front of our boat. It was quite a scene seeing these enormous blobs trying to swim, but they managed to do it surprisingly gracefully. Who woulda thought?

Finally, to finish our wonderful day as tourists that finally had some money, we hit up the dinner buffet. While the food was quite good, and even had a giant impala leg which had some pretty incredible meat on it, the rest of the experience was quite strange. While the overall ambience was what you would expect of an African game lodge trying to create some exotic African feeling with masks and spears and all the other things tourists want to see, the music was shockingly off from this theme. They had an elderly man on a digital keyboard playing all of the most clichéd American songs one could think of: Sweet Home Alabama, Elvis, you name it.

We left the buffet full and once again confused by the whole atmosphere of the lodge, which seemed to be the theme of the place, and went to sleep.

-Aaron