The REAL Africa - Part 1

You know the Africa you see in movies?  The Africa with wild animals, women walking with jugs on their heads, and groups of people living in thatched huts?  Well that’s not Cape Town.  Or most of what I’ve seen of South Africa for that matter.  I know Papa thinks I’m going to come home with a bone in my nose, but we all know that’s not the African experience I’m having.  Although it might let Papa down a bit, even after spending time in Botswana and Zimbabwe, I still don’t think I’ll encounter any nose piercings via bone.  I’m sure you’re all extremely surprised.  I have, however, entered what I think is my idea of the REAL Africa.

This “spring Break” (although it’s still summer here) trip began at 4am 2 Fridays ago.  Well technically 3am because that’s when I woke up to start the trip.  My bag was packed and I was ready to go – sleeping bag and all.  (See Dad, I told you I’d manage locating my sleeping bag on time!)  Although I’d gone to sleep a bit after 2am (I was hanging out with Michael, Hannah, and some others then came home to a snuggle party with Franny and Jen), I managed to get up at 3 for a shower and a muesli breakfast with Hannah.  We met our bus across the street, hopped on, and after a few more stops arrived at the Cape Town airport.  We were taking Kalula airlines, which my marketing professor refers to regularly.  That was sort of cool, except I slept the whole way thankfully, so sadly for my marketing research, I didn’t get to observe all of Kalula’s unique features.  Maybe next time. 

We arrived in Johannesburg, grabbed our stuff and headed out to our “home” for the next week and a half.  It’s the coolest truck ever!  We all had our own lockers, there’s food storage, mats, tents, big open windows for high quality air ventilation (who needs air conditioning, really?).  Basically anything you’d ever need while camping was in this truck.  We had a driver named Dudu and a chef named Norman.  I think this was pretty high quality camping.

I’m not sure if it’s good or bad that I didn’t know how far we were going to drive that first day.  We started at 9am and didn’t get to camp until about 9pm.  Granted, there were quite a few bathroom breaks and a lunch stop.  Unfortunately around noon I started feeling sick.  One thing led to another and I had a really bad stomach bug that quickly made the bumpy, windy truck ride a bit rougher.  I didn’t want to be “that girl” who was sick and in a bad mood the first day so I did a decent job of keeping my misery to myself.  Highlights of the illness include:

-The non-flushing toilet at the South African side of the border

-Throwing up into a weave at the Botswana side of the border (if you don’t know what a weave is I highly suggest you watch the movie Good Hair, but if that isn’t accessible you can always just Google what a weave is)

-Hugging the trashcan on the floor in the back of the truck for the last hour of the drive to camp

-Getting my tent set up for me

-Throwing up at camp after dark while wearing my headlamp so it featured as a spotlight for all to see how much fun I was having

Not going to lie – it was rough.

Luckily, I had a few bites of white rice before bed so I could take Tylenol PM to ease my fever and get some sleep.  In the morning I felt much better and was ready to start the trip.  We had breakfast at our campsite: some yogurt, tea, cereal, toast and peanut butter.  Side note: the only milk we had the whole trip was whole milk.  It was paradise once I got home to finally have a bowl of cereal without a side of cream in it.  It became a running joke between Hannah and I because it was such a “first world problems” moment.  Anyway, I took my malaria medicine and some motion sickness medicine juuust in case and we were off.

Somehow we failed again to understand that we were in for yet another almost full day of driving.  We made a lunch stop on the side of the road and had some tasty Norman (our chef) sandwiches.  I became a huge fan of Sweet Chili Sauce on this break by the way.

While we were eating, we enjoyed the view – dirt, grass, donkeys, and sheep.  After some time, a few locals on donkeys came up to us and attempted to communicate.  We had a brief book from the travel company that had words translated from English to Setswana, but we failed to approach these correctly, resulting in endless laughter from both us and our new friends.  Overall, it was just a hilarious situation because of the language barrier.  We said nothing but laughed with each other for about 10 minutes over our attempts to pronounce Setswana words.  The Botswanian guys loved it.  It was basically the ultimate example of laughter being a universal language.

After this we reloaded onto the bus, made one stop for refreshments in Maun and arrived at our campsite.  Here we had a scrumptious spaghetti dinner and the first shower of the trip – epic.  We hung out at the bar, enjoyed a beer, and all sat around singing while Ty played his guitar.

Side note: our truck consisted of 18 American students.  Three of which were guys.  Of those guys, one was on the trip with his girlfriend, another (Jesse) is gay, and the other Ty is straight and single.  You can just imagine how ridiculous of a dynamic this was throughout the trip.  It was an awesome group of people and everyone got along great.  Also our leader, Kristen, was the coolest ever.  She’s from Germany.  We love her endlessly.

Back to the story.

Day 1 of the Okavango Delta:

We left our campsite early in the morning.  We were told we had to fit everything into a backpack and carry our sleeping bag along.  With our limited belongings (everything else was locked in our truck, which was named Kurt), we boarded an open truck to start our journey to the Delta. 

The drive was two hours long.   The first hour we passed a few villages and small towns.  Everyone was so friendly as we went by, going out of his or her way to wave at us and shoot us a smile.  In South Africa, I’d like to think I fit in relatively well.  There’s less racial disparity in the sense that there are numerous races and a tangible amount of whites that I can pretend I fit in with.  In Botswana, however, we were clearly tourists who didn’t belong.  They never made us feel that way, but it was easy to see that we were out of any relatable territory.

The second half of the drive included us “off roading” in our dual truck/water open vehicle.  There were more than a few times that I thought the log bridges we crossed in our truck wouldn’t hold our weight and we’d go diving into the river below.  Luckily, the bridges were much more stable than they appeared.  Our group was split into two trucks, the first of which was a little too big for its britches apparently.  In attempts to go through water, it got stuck and we had to take a pit stop for our truck to tow it out.

Finally, we arrived at the water’s edge of the Okavango Delta.  Over a dozen mkoros were waiting for us.  It was so surreal!  None of us really had any idea what to expect, but I can definitely say whatever I had thought we were going to was not nearly as cool as this was!

I was in a mkoro with Hannah as our poler, Richard, pushed us from behind.  Our destination was an island on which we’d be camping on for the next three days.

I wish I could describe the ride adequately enough, but there are really no words to explain the excitement, tranquility, and adventure of what it was like.  Lily pads and high reeds surrounded us.  It was scorching hot even though it was about 9 in the morning.  We also had some locals in the river with us.  Our good old friends, the hippos.  One of the more unnerving/unreal things about these mkoro rides was the poler’s ability to avoid the hippos and keep us safe.

After a peaceful two-hour trip, we finally arrived at our campsite where we set up our tents and ate lunch.  For purposes of this trip, we had to fit four people to a tent, which comfortably fits about two normal sized people (three small people can comfortably fit).  The first two nights, Hannah and I had shared a tent, but once we realized we had to join up, Ty and Ali joined in as well.  So basically, it was us three girls and the tallest person on the trip sleeping in a 2-3-man tent.  Some would say this was a bold endeavor, but we ended up having so much fun tenting together in the Delta that we were the only group to keep our 4-man tent for the rest of the trip.

We named our tent O-Tent II and were basically the hooligans of the trip.  We were always the last to go to bed and although we tried I know we weren’t as quiet as we thought we were.  We participated in fun tent bonding activities throughout the trip.  Some of which were planned, others weren’t.  We also tried to keep things exciting by utilizing the tent space differently every night.  We tried sleeping diagonally, vertically, horizontally, etc.  Although it probably doesn’t sound all that humorous, we got a good laugh every night by taking turns being the “designer” who would creatively organizing our sleeping bags to a new sleeping arrangement before we returned from dinner.  On the last night, we thought we’d be really ambitious and conquer an O-Tent II Bucket List.  Unfortunately, we didn’t finish everything, but I will comment on my favorite activities:

1)    Worm fights: this is when you put sleeping bags over your head and do exactly what it sounds like – FIGHT!  Obviously it was kind of a joke because really, we were being children so it didn’t get that intense.

2)    Share “tent talk secrets”

3)    Talk about highs and lows of the trip

4)    Take a human pyramid selfie: four people, one tent, trying to make a human pyramid and then take a picture of it.  I repeat, we were hooligans.

Ali, Hannah, and I also played the ultimate prank on Ty for April Fools Day.  It would sound strange and debatably inappropriate to try to explain on my blog, but if you want to hear about it just ask and I’ll tell you all about how we got our whole bus in on it.  Definitely one of the highlights of the trip.

Anyway, back to the Delta.  During our stay on the Delta, we were accompanied by the polers who basically doubled as our local tour guides.  There was literally no civilization on this island so when I say tour guide I’m using it in a different sense of the word.  They led us on game walks, took us to see elephants right outside our campsite, went fishing with us, and taught us fun activities such as how to maneuver a mkoro.

We were all so hot on the first day so we thought it’d be a good idea to go swimming.  I mean, we were surrounded by water, so who wouldn’t go swimming on a sunny day like that?  Answer: all the polers.  They showed us a watering hole that was too shallow for hippos to go into so we took it upon ourselves to enjoy the warm water with a game of duck-duck-goose Delta-style.  The polers were clearly much wiser than us because within about 10 minutes, I felt something small and slimy attached to my knee.  Not knowing what it was, I freaked out and we all laughed a lot.  It didn’t seem alarming enough to get out of the water (even though I was convinced it was a leech), so we all continued playing our game.  Within 5 more minutes, three more girls had been attacked and we quickly gathered that these were, in fact, leeches.  (By the way, I'm the one below on the left side that is high-fiving an imaginary person.  Not too sure what I was doing here.)

You should have seen us make a B-line to the water’s edge.  It was actually hilarious and the polers were cracking up while watching us push each other out of the way to get to dry-leech-free land.  Jokingly, I was a bit bitter that no one believed me when I cried leech the first time!  One particularly funny leech incident occurred when a leech attached under Megan’s bathing suit top.  No one really knew the right way to approach that and it was just overall hilarious.

Recovered from our attack by leeches, we headed back to the campsite.  Ty, Hannah, Ali, and I were a bit confused at a new addition to the tree above our tent.  It seemed that the polers had hung some sort of “animal innards” to dry on the branch.  As Ty said, it was very curious.  The innards remained for the rest of the trip, but were all gone by the time we left.  I assume the innards were part of a meal for the polers at some point.  (The innards are both in the bag and hanging on the right side. The lighting in the picture makes it difficult to see.)

One of the most important things they told us about our campsite is that we were literally on an island with elephants, lions, giraffes, rhinos, you name it.  We had to be extremely cautious not to leave the site without a poler with us in case of wild animals.  I kid you not.  That will probably the only time I have to make sure there are no lions near my local “bathroom” hole.  That being said, there were some really cool animal encounters!  On the first day, two of the polers pulled us away from camp about a five-minute walk to see some elephants under a tree!  If you look really closely, you can see the elephant under the tree.

At dusk, we went on our first “game walk” and saw quite a few more elephants.  I still cannot believe that we walked around to see animals.  Whenever I think safari, I think of a safari truck or even boat tour, but never would I have imagined that we were questing for animals on foot!  They also gave us the escape mechanisms/routes to get away from each of the animals we were looking for.  For example, if you’re outrunning an elephant, don’t climb a tree because they’ll knock it down.  That’s a safety preparedness drill I never thought I’d have…

We got to the camp right before dark, just in time for dinner.  We quickly realized we were getting attacked by bugs even with our excessive amounts of mosquito spray so the night ended “early” and we headed back to our respective tents.  I put early in quotes because it ended early for everyone else.  Naturally, O-tent II took it upon ourselves to stay up much later than everyone else.

The next morning came bright and early.  Well, it was actually not that bright seeing as how it was still dark.  Regardless, it came early.  We had a cup of tea and Hannah and I had a few too many rusks than was socially acceptable to hold us over (I’d guess between four and five).  Rusks are sort of like biscotti-esque biscuits people eat with tea.  It was going to be a few hours until the real breakfast so we decided to load up. 

We took a short mkoro trip to a neighboring island to go on yet another game walk.  Luckily, we strategically avoided the hippos on the way.  This was my favorite game walk of the trip.  (To clarify, I have a favorite game walk, drive, and cruise.  Three separate means of encountering animals).  We were able to get so close to zebras!!!  I’ve also decided zebras are my new favorite animal because they are SO COOL.  First, they’re not aggressive/mean/dangerous (well as little as possible for being a wild animal).  They are pretty much super exotic horses – who wouldn’t be into that?!  We literally spent 45 minutes playing a “game of chess” with the zebras.  We’d move closer, they’d move farther, we’d move again, they’d stay, then they’d move.  It was actually really interesting watching them asses whether or not we were predators or not.

Also on this walk we saw baboons, buffalo horns, impala, and warthogs.  We returned to our campsite for a fabulous Norman-made breakfast of eggs and bacon.  Ali and I spent the morning tanning in a mkoro and before we knew it, it was time for lunch.  Hannah and I went on a fishing excursion with some polers later as well.  It was a nice and relaxing day.  We learned our lesson the day before and decided not to swim.

Around 5pm, we left for a sunset mkoro ride along the Delta.  It was absolutely stunning.  All the sunsets in Botswana are like watercolor paintings.  The sky turns shades of purple, pink, and orange.  It is incredible.  It's actually pretty similar to a California sunset.  This night also marked the first night of Passover.  There were at least eight people on my trip who are Jewish so they had a makeshift Passover Seder back at the campsite.  It was pretty cool.  I’ve sort of seen a real Passover at GW, so it was interesting seeing Passover: Botswana edition.

After Norman’s incredible dinner of lamp chops, baked potatoes, and tomato-ey gravy we gathered around the fire for a performance from our polers.  They sang and danced to a few Setswana songs.  Our favorite was the one they sang in English that was reminiscing on our trip.  We decided we’d offer them a cultural experience as well, so Ty pulled out his guitar and we attempted to find a song we all knew the words to.  The winners were Party in the USA (later rewritten as Party in the Delta), Our Song by Taylor Swift, Hey Ya by Outkast, and Jumper.  I’m not sure if that’s a cultural red flag that these were the songs we all knew the words to, but regardless we all had so much fun dancing and singing.  After another late night O-tent II talk, we went to bed on our last night in the Delta.

The morning brought our last sunrise game walk.  We packed up the mkoros and took the trip back to our good old truck, Kurt.  Although we were all excited to shower and use a real bathroom, we definitely were going to miss the Delta.  It’s funny how easily it was to get used to doing absolutely nothing with our days.  We did a lot of sitting around and talking, played a lot of icebreaker games, and also did a fair amount of exploring.  Not once did I miss my phone or feel the need to check Facebook.  It was probably the most simple, relatively speaking, part of the trip, but it was also one of my favorites.  I cannot imagine every being able to do something like that again in my life.  I mean, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but when will I ever be able to camp on a random island in the Delta with a bunch of people I just met, avoid wild animals on my trips to the bathroom, spontaneously get attacked by leeches in what is more or less hippo-infested water, or relax on a mkoro while watching the sunset?  Most likely never again.

PS: Spring break posts are coming in waves.  More to come!!

PSS: My school advisor, Jeremy, asked me to write a "guest blog post" for the blog he keeps for his students!  I was very honored to have been asked to write it :) If you want to check it out, just click below!
Guest Blog Post