Santawani Lodge Hosts Royal Entourage
The royal princes Prince William and Prince Harry, on a well-publicised official visit to southern Africa, are in Botswana’s Okavango Delta where they are attending an event in support of Coaching for Conservation. There was excitement at Santawani Lodge yesterday as the mystery booking made by the Botswana Department of Tourism turned out to be for the royal entourage. The princes were staying at the adjacent Botswana Predator Conservation Project, which has been based in the Santawani area since its inception in the 1980s. ther BPCP conducts ground-breaking research into spotted hyaena, leopard, cheetah and Cape Hunting Dogs in this predator-rich area, with special emphasis on scent analysis and replication as a method of controlling the movement of predators.
Prince William and especially prince Harry are well-known private visitors to the Okavango, but this is their first official visit. Santawani Lodge, Lodges of Botswana and the community of Sankuyo are proud to be associated with their visit.
Children Love The Okavango!
Children love the Okavango! The vibrancy, the freedom, the obvious rawness of the natural environment throbbing with life is very often closer to the child-state than it is to adulthood. The view that ‘they’re still too young to appreciate it’ could not be further from the truth. We believe it especially important, in this day and age, that kids have access to the natural world, and to be in an environment in which they are forced to direct their attention to the wider world, and away from hand-held electronic devices and computer screens – to stretch their eyes to the distance, to experience smells other than fried fumes and fumes, to experience the heightened sense of awareness that comes with the knowledge of life and death around you, to let their imaginations take wing, to consider possibilities unconsidered. And we love children. African societies place enormous store in children as a measure of the future’s possibilities, and our guides are no exception. They revel in the readiness of children to embrace new experiences and to learn, and they revel in the opportunity to be a conduit of knowledge. Our policy at Delta Camp and Oddballs’ of having a maximum of two guests per guide affords unrivalled opportunities for families and children to interact with the fantastical, very real world we live in and love. Bring them on!
Super Flood 2010
Living in the Okavango one accepts the vagaries of nature – if one were not prepared to do so this would not be the place to live. As challenging as it is not to be able to control one’s environment, it is also a pleasure and an increasingly rare privilege to live close to nature, to experience her whims and her cycles of renewal and regeneration and, of course, the death and decay that precede them. Living close to the earth is nourishment for the soul.
Inextricably linked to this existence are the seminal events – the once-in-a-lifetime occurrences that are a stark reminder that Mother Nature marches to her own drum. The world seems to have had a spate of these in recent years – earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions that have challenged our belief in our ‘right’ to employ our technology as we see fit, lashing storms….and the great Okavango flood of 2010. We had a big on in 1984, but this is shaping up to be more like the flood of 1956, the flood that drowned Harry Riley and Harold de Kock, two of the Okavango’s pioneers, submerged the only bridge between Maun and the rest of the world, and caused mayhem to the few people that then lived here.
What is different today is that the Okavango plays host to an economically important tourism industry, and Maun has grown beyond all recognition into the commercial and administrative centre for the vast north west of Botswana. Airstrips that serve lodges are daily being submerged. Lodges themselves are becoming unusable and many houses in and around Maun are under threat. What is good news for the ecology is turning out to be bad news for the economy. I’m not convinced that this is not as it should be - a reality check in our modern world of acquisitiveness and ‘return’. I’ll show you a turn, and it’s in the weather. In fact maybe you should come here and see it for yourself. One vast oasis of crystal clear, uncontaminated water, fresh from the Angolan highlands, soaking into the Kalahari desert sands, pouring nutrients into arid soils, creating secure environments for all manner of living things, and taking the breath with its sheer beauty. The Okavango in flood, again and properly at last. It’s been a long wait.
To See A Pels Fishing Owl
It always amazes me how serendipitous sightings are, how very easy it is to miss – or catch - the most dramatic wildlife action by the merest chance. The most dramatic example of this I have experienced was watching eight lionesses, under cover of 10pm darkness, stalk, kill and eat a reedbuck ram not 50 yards from where 30 revellers were celebrating a birthday. Although they passéd within a few feet of us before the kill the entire episode, which we watched by spotlight, would have gone entirely unnoticed had someone not seen a movement next to her and had a torch to hand with which to pick up a lioness moving rapidly through the grass. The reedbuck was so totally consumed and the evidence of the incident so slight that even the following morning we would have had no idea whatsoever what had transpired.
I was reminded of this a few evenings ago as I sat with Darcie Carr, a tour operator from Colorado, in the Delta Camp sitting room. She was talking about her new-found interest in birds and her hopes of seeing a Pels Fishing Owl before she left the Okavango. As she was talking her eyes rose above my shoulder and popped – in silent majesty her Pels had alighted on a branch not 15 feet behind me. Ten seconds later, and equally silently, it was gone. Had we been looking at a picture of one in a book during those few seconds, neither of us would have seen it.
Thomas Friedman on “The Land of NO Service”
Putting aside the prolific wildlife, the breathtaking landscapes and the gentle proud people, one of the most important aspects of the safari experience here in Botswana is that you have to "disconnect". These days, as a fully wired member of contemporary society, it is hard to imagine what it is or was like to live without all of your gadgets, cell phones, email or all of the above. While many of us revel in the unforeseen freedoms of modern technology and are thankful that we are always connected and can work from anywhere, the price we pay is, ironically, that we no longer have to be anywhere. We have lost our ability to be present in the moment and to be conscious of where we are when we are there. Thomas Freidman of the New York Times wrote an Op Ed piece on visiting Botswana and what he witnessed as a result of being "disconnected". Whilst in Botswana, in the bush on safari, you have no choice but to be HERE and to be present because this is the 'Land of NO Service', like it or lump it, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16friedman.html?_r=2.
The Flood
The annual pulse of Angolan floodwaters is the principal annual recurrence here, on which absolutely everything depends. The timing and the extent of the flooding means everything to us – what areas become accessible by mekoro, the dug-out canoes that are our traditional means of transport, where the game will move, what the extremes of temperature are likely to be, and what sort of breeding season the fish, on which so much other life depends, will enjoy. News of the flood is, as you may imagine, eagerly awaited if skeptically received. Somehow one never knows what the reports portend for one’s own patch of swamp – will the water flow this year to the East? The West? Will it be evenly distributed or will some unheralded event – a minor shift in the earth’s temperamental crust, or the creation of a new hippo path, direct and divert the flow in unpredictable directions? Are the water-flow meters maintained by the Dept of Water Affairs accurate? Are they being read properly? Can we believe the anecdotal reports of famously mischievous local characters? The proof, as always, is in the pudding.
This year delivered what all reports were indicating – the biggest flood in 20 years. It is at times like these that being old-timers works to our advantage – our camps and our airstrip were built when floodwaters were characteristically much higher than they have been in the past couple of decades – decades which have also seen a massive increase in the numbers of camps and airstrips, many of which are now under water. Whilst sympathizing with our colleagues, we are rejoicing in the high water, which is providing a badly needed flush of the Okavango system, inundating old river-courses and floodplains long colonized by acacias, pushing water into ancient fish-breeding areas, raising the water table far inland, replenishing aquifers and constricting the reach of the annual fires that sweep the country during the dry winter months.
In particular, our activities in the central Okavango centre around the use of traditional mekoro, and high water opens vast areas to us for safe use, allowing us to utilize shallow floodplains where hippo can’t surprise us, and giving us ready access to areas we haven’t visited, but on foot, for many years. Our camping trails are getting into pristine areas, and we are looking forward to an explosion in the fish and water-fowl populations later in the year. As the waters recede from late-August onwards we expect wonderful game and bird sightings on the fringes of the floodplains and forests. With any luck we are entering a new cycle of high water, the very raison d’ etre of the Okavango swamps.