Change In Plans

Makgadikgadi Pan

Greetings from sunny Cape Town!

We have been back in normal life for almost a month: kids in school, India and me in relatively consistent routines, weeks flying by.

Before the memories fade, I wanted to record the rest of the adventures that India and her parents had with Zola and Tallulah up in Botswana after I left them in early January. 

Hot!

I flew out of Jack’s Camp on the Makgadigadi Pan on a Monday morning, after a final game drive and a late breakfast.  Six hours later, I was in Johannesburg.  India & Co. stayed at Jack’s for another couple of days.  The day I left, the rangers organized a mid-day soccer game for Zola out on the open salt pan.  As India described it, the temperature had gotten over 100 degrees, and she and Zola and half a dozen African rangers played 4 on 4 soccer for about 45 minutes.   No one keeled over from heat stroke, but there was consensus to declare a tie, and not come back on the field for the second half.

Jack’s employs a real Bushman/San tracker whose English name is Cobra.  Cool name.  Cobra was training three young guys in the lost arts of tracking and desert survival, and took India and kids along.  He showed them how to light fires with zebra dung, how to set up dung-beetle fights (hours of entertainment), and how to dig a scorpion out of its nest.  Cobra had a sharp stick, and dug about three feet down, pulling out a scorpion the size of Tallulah’s hand.  Through a translator, he explained that scorpions with big pincers and small tails are not very venomous (and the converse is true).  It’s a judgment call, I guess, as to what constitutes “big pincers.”

Cobra Rinses the Scorpion

Cobra gripped the scorpion by the (small) tail and (big) pincers, and put it into his mouth.  My mother-in-law gagged.  He wasn’t eating the scopion, although my guess is he has eaten a few.  Instead, he wa cleaning the dust off it, so that the kids could see the details of the exoskeleton more clearly.  Full service.

From Jack’s the family took a small plane about two hours northwest, flying back over Maun, and into the Okavango Delta.  Mombo Camp has been at the top of India’s wish list for nearly a decade, and it did not disappoint.  The Delta is unique, because a mighty river flows into the desert, disippates into a huge freshwater swamp, and then evaporates.  The islands in the swamp are incredibly lush, and packed with wild animals.  India and I went to the Delta with erh parents way back in 1992, but none of us had been since.  Jane, my mother-in-law, was still surprised that she had somehow been talked into a return visit.

At Mombo, the kids told me that they saw 51 lions.  Lions eating giraffe, lions fighting each other, lions mating, lions sleeping.  Circle of life stuff.  They saw herds of thousands of antelope, buffalo, waterbuck, and zebra.  This is the low season for game watching, so the rangers kep apologizig for the sparsity of the sightings.

Tallulah saw her favorite animal, the monitor lizard (maybe the same one that President Clinton saw on his trip to Botswana and made a joke about, many years ago).  As Tallulah tells me, “Monitor lizards are scary because they can break your leg with their strong tails.”  Apparently this is true.

As the family was checking in, Tallulah also spotted a snake in the lodge, hanging down from the rafters.  I’m told that the dialogue went like this:

Tallulah:  “I see a snake.”

India: “That’s just a tree branch”

Tallulah “I see a snake”

India: “There are no snakes here, Tallulah.  That is a branch hanging down from the roof.”

Tallulah: “I see a snake.  It just moved.”

Annie (the Batswana manageress of the lodge), “Aaaaaaggh.  It’s a bloody snake.  Get someone quickly to take care of it!”

On the flight from Mombo back to Maun, the thunderheads were building, so the pilot stayed at 500 feet the whole way.  Zola told me it was like a bonus game drive.  Herds of elephants trumpeted at the sky, and circled their young for safety.  Giraffe broke into full gallop (which is something to see), and they could see crocodiles slithering into the water.  Not exactly low-impact observation, but something to see.

So, now back to boring old school, and sports, and play dates and violin lessons.  They had quite a trip.