Gabs to Maun

By Zachariah. 

From Groot Marico we take a bus across the border to Gaborone in Botswana. We bought our tickets online again but probably should have just shown up. After standing around the door to the bus for ten minutes a man walks over, grabs our bags and throws them in the baggage trailer. When I try to get our names ticked off the list he just tells me "the lady" will take care of it and walks off. Another ten minutes and "the lady" appears and tells us to get on without asking for a ticket or payment. They might have been expecting two passengers at the stop but I'm half sure we could have just got on without a ticket and they wouldn't have realised until we got to the border.

The bus is quick, however, there was a delay at the border crossing. Everyone has to disembark, go through immigration, before coming back to the bus and removing all bags, going through "customs" (a pair of ladies who were confiscating anything they liked the look of. We lost our avocado's but they didn't find our sweet potatoes) and then waiting another half an hour for the bus to clear the same process. Eventually we make our way to the hostel. I say "the" hostel because Gaborone, or 'Gabs' as the locals call it, literally only has the one. We get in around 9pm and find that everyone (and everything) is asleep, including an enormously fat pig snoring next to our room. I didn't even notice it at first, but Elise's delighted exclamation of "Is that a pig?!" and receiving a "yes" like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, was the highlight of our stay in Gabs.

The next day we would discover that Gabs is cold (there was a thick fog for most of the morning), quiet (I think we see a half dozen people outside the hostel, tops), and lacking anything resembling working internet (frustrating when you've set the day aside for research and planning). There were some entertaining animals at the hostel, aside from the pig. Some chickens, a few ducks swimming in the pool, a dog who slept almost as much as the pig, and a pack of the ugliest cats you will ever see anywhere. The cats were incredibly friendly, perhaps starved for attention on account of their looks, and when I started patting one I found myself literally covered in felines. Around 6pm that night the internet suddenly came to life, but only if we stood in the middle of the driveway, on one leg, with a cat balanced on our heads. We crammed as much research as we could into the forty-five minutes it was working and then got an early night ahead of our 6am bus next day.

5:30am saw us showered and packed waiting for our taxi in the driveway. 5:45 saw us trying to call our taxi driver who was twenty minutes late. By the time he finally arrived to race us across town to the bus station, with little control (read: none) over the situation we could only sit back and hope for the best. In the end we got there bang on time and the bus didn't leave for another ten minutes. Looking back at this now, as well as the bus chase in Joburg, I feel that it was the start of several learnings. First, let go of our attachment to a schedule, both in the sense that things here don't run to a fixed schedule, and that the idea we need to be somewhere by a certain day or time doesn't work very well on this continent. Second, that Google knows very little about Africa compared to the rest of the world and local knowledge can be sketchy, conflicting, out of date or simply incorrect. Third, flexibility is the key to travelling here. You have to be ready to get there early, wait for the bus to fill up and accept that it will stop every ten minutes (or sometimes not at all for hours) and you will get there when you get there. It was a steep learning curve, but we have gradually relaxed our concept of time here.

The bus was a whole experience in and of itself. Nothing like the semi-comfortable coaches we took in South Africa. It was freezing cold for the first half of the trip as none of the windows seemed to seal properly. We rugged up as best we could and tried to get some more sleep. The bus route saw us skirt around the edges of and even cut through sections of the Kalahari desert. Sadly, without your own transportation the Kalahari is largely inaccessible. Though tales of black maned lions and the Kalahari bush men (and women, I assume) did tempt us to try. By the afternoon we were a few hundred kilometres north and the sun had appeared to turn the bus into a twelve-wheeled oven. The whole 850 kilometres took us about ten hours (which is actually incredibly quick for African public transport) and we were half cooked by the time we reached Maun.

Maun (pronounced: Mah-uhn) is a fun little town on the edge of the Okavango Delta. Because it is the jump off point for all ventures into the delta it is constantly busy with people coming and going. There is a little airport flying people in and out of Botswana as well as launching charter flights into the delta. Many of the lodges and sights further in are only accessible by air. The Okavango spans around 15,000 square kilometres, all of which sees no more than 2 metres variation in altitude. Each year over ten cubic kilometres of water, beginning as rain in Angola and taking three months to make the journey, turn this incredible landscape into a vast network of rivers, islands and wetlands. Because of this it is home to a truly stunning amount of wildlife. Especially during the dry season when animals across the continent come in search of water.

At the far end of town is Old Bridge Backpackers, which the Lonely Planet describes as a "bar at the end of the world" kind of vibe. It's not quite the end of the world but you wouldn't be disappointed if it was. Adeptly named Old Bridge because of the bridge, which is both old and dangerous, but it’s a serious shortcut to the main road. Not for the faint hearted. There's a large thatch-roofed bar perched next to the bank of the river with a mix of native syringa and Australian gum trees, which shade you while you sit back with a beer and watch the river. There is a steady flow of animals, mainly cows, goats or donkeys, down to the river but also fish jumping, people fishing from the bridge, a couple of impressive monitor lizards and the occasional crocodile. In our rooms (we got one the first night to recover from the bus trip and the last night for a treat) we will encounter a range of small to medium gecko's, and some sort of vole that used the insect netting for a place to sleep during the day.

We hang around town for a couple days, exploring the cultural museum, the local cafes and searching for baskets and weavings for Elise. The local women weave baskets with different patterns to represent various animals. A lady at one of the local shops shows us through the various designs, ostrich running, turtle shell, warriors shield and buffalo peeing (no jokes). They also teach the local technique and Elise spent a morning there developing her craft. One morning we organised a taxi to take us to 'Motsana', a local "arts centre", basically a little tourist market with a café attached. They are a little touristy but we're curious and the photo's on Google look good so we decide to check it out. We tell the driver where we want to go and he seems to know where it is but when we get to the main road he turns away from town. The road loops back around the other side of the river so at first we figured it must be faster than the other way, but then he turns the opposite direction again and heads up the highway north of town. There followed yet another lesson in African travel, where I placed my faith squarely in Google over the local driver only for us to find ourselves in the middle of some local housing backstreets looking at chickens, dogs and children instead of baskets, fabrics and carvings. The catch to this lesson is you never know whether to trust Google or local knowledge. Both have proven false at different points. When we eventually do find Motsana it is fairly disappointing. A tiny market, a mediocre café and a children's dance studio which seems to be the main function of the space. But we are not in Maun to explore tourist markets or fact check Google's information.

We are there for the same reason as everyone else; to head into the Okavango. The fly-in lodges are way out of our budget but we are in for a shock with the prices of even the basic expeditions. Botswana is a wealthy country (thanks to their mining industry), and the Okavango is one of the most impressive wildlife reserves on the planet and they are set up to take advantage of that fact. Eventually we narrow our options down to the overnight Mokoro (dug-out canoe) trip, which is offered fully or self-catered. Fully-catered sounds amazing but it works out $500 more expensive than the self-catered trip and I don't think there's a tent or meal on earth worth $500 a night. We have our own tent, can cook food to take with us and self-catered is at least within sight of our budget so it seems the obvious choice. Only we are slightly apprehensive about heading into the delta with just the two of us and one guide for 24 hours. We discuss pros and cons and risks of awkward silences before deciding to sleep on it. Next morning we wake to find a new tent next to ours and a Dutch couple around our age occupying it. We get talking and discover they are in the same position as us. From there it was simple, and next morning we were on the edge of the Okavango with some new mates, a box full of food and several bottles of wine.