We broke camp and were on the road by 6am driving through a morning rain. We arrived in Maun by 8am looking for a coffee fix and a warm omelette. The town of Maun has a very odd vibe. Thirty years ago, this was a dusty old town full of hunters, ranchers & poachers. There were no paved roads, one food market with empty shelves, & primitive huts made of mud & beer cans; a true outpost of the Okavango wilderness. The kind of place where the desolation was tangible, unless you went to the boozer where the entire dirt lot in front of the bar was full of beat up 4x4 trucks with rifles on the roof racks. The entire town could be found inside getting juiced and if you got into an argument, you better be able to fight. This was the womb where exaggerated stories of the “Great White Hunters” were born. Tall tales of face-to-face encounters with lions, rhino, or elephants grew from rumor to legend. Some truth-fueled, others whiskey-fueled.
We met up with Gabriel’s friend Ivan at a local café over breakfast. They were high school buddies from Switzerland and now Ivan is a bush pilot who flies wealthy tourists into high-dollar camps in the delta. They caught up on each others lives in their mother tongue, Italian, while I fixed myself on caffeine. A few locals (Ivan’s friends) joined us and soon our table swelled to ten. One of them, Ursula, was a local mocha latte girl who owned a shop of handicrafts made by local artisans. Her mother is Botswanan and father is European. She gave us the quick tour of Maun, we refueled (both the tank and all 4 jerry cans, which are 20 liter spare fuel tanks) and we were roadside again by 10am. Within 20 minutes, the paved road gave way to dirt track and we were singin’ Swiss Army boot camp songs as we entered a vast remote wilderness full of wildlife.
The Okavango Delta. The world’s largest inland delta system inhabited by an enormous abundance of biodiversity. The 800 mile Okavango River, whose headwaters originate in the highlands of Angola, enters Botswana at its northern border with Namibia and flows into the panhandle before dispersing into a web of channels, lagoons, & swamps. The annual flood arrives in April, sprawling out across an open palm of waterways until it becomes absorbed by thirsty dry air and the sands of the Kalahari desert, which lie just south of it. This is the kind of place which forces you to re-examine your place in the universe.
The intermittent rain turned this leg of the journey into a slow slog. We decided to pull over at an immense Baobob tree and gather firewood since the wet wood would need time to dry out in our truck bed. We arrived at Moremi Game Reserve with a mud splattered beast of a truck. The warden looked at the vehicle, looked back at us quizzically, and shook his head. Im certain he was thinking, “Look at these crazy white boys. That mud wagon wont make it 10 miles in here and Im the one who will have to rescue their sorry-ass when they get stuck in the muck.” Afterall, very few travelers make the journey into the delta during the wet season. Most fly in with private chartered planes into luxury lodges. Other who drive do it in fancy Range Rovers. We limped in with a piece of crap pickup truck with a wounded alternator.
We arrived at our campsite (3rd Bridge) at dusk and pitched the tent. There was a steady din of noise that seemed odd and after looking up, we discovered why. A troop of over 30 baboons filled the tree canopy above us. Not good. Baboons are precision thieves and often raid camps of anything left out while away. We moved off to an area boon-free, made a feeble fire in the drizzle, and crashed.
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