Ana Lúcia and Oliver Wood's Travels: December 2007

Apologies for the silence. I can provide no excuse other than the excesses that Cape Town has to offer. I left you with our feet dangling over the edge of Mosi-oa-Tunya, AKA the smoke that thunders, AKA Victoria Falls. Here are some snaps to round this bit off.

Zambian kids

Magic Zambezi sunset

River cormorants on the Zambezi

Sundowners on the river

From these auspicious surrounds we are whisked away, in a game-viewing vehicle, by our safari guide, Ronald. He drives us two, a Canadian mother-daughter combo, and Fredde, a taciturn Dane with a great big camera, to the border with Botswana. It's a great experience crossing the Zambezi on a pontoon into Botswana, where the cheeriest immigration officer on the planet ushers us into the country. The omens are good for the next eight days, as a herd of impala, hotly pursued by a pack of hounds, darts across the road.

Well you wouldn't sit on it...

Our safari support vehicle

The game jeep

Lucy helps the safari support team to fix their punctured tyre

Our safari dining room

We head first for the river Chobe and the park on its banks. Botswana's game reserves are proper wilderness, without tarred roads and minimal management. One could drive for days without seeing anything, or should you believe the literature, you could see 500 elephants at a time. It seems initially that we might fall into the former category, as Chobe seems like an unpromising, broken land of scrub and rock. There's plenty of elephant shit, but no elephants to back it up. Ronald gloomily informs us that we have come at the wrong time of year, just a month earlier we would have been bored with the sight of elephants. We head for camp, in the trees, and a surprisingly good dinner. We are camping out in an unfenced site. Ronald sits us down before the bush television (a fire) and describes our journey that will take us to three more camps in Chobe and the Okavango. On the days we transfer between camps, "it will be hard", says Ronald. The sky is heavy with rain, and Ronald has been suffering from Malaria. This is not looking so good.

Things brighten the next day and a boat trip on the Chobe lightens the mood. It turns out the river is chokka with crocs, hippos, birds and even an elephant. The Namibian side of the water is quite interesting to see, as it is a great meadow for cattle breeding. Fishermen rove the banks standing precariously on mokoro canoes, dodging the natural hazards. Back at camp, a honey badger disturbs our sleep by crashing about in the kitchen. Remembering Ronald's dinner-time horror stories keep us all inside the tents.

Cormorants on the Chobe river

Friendly-ish hippos

The next day we transfer to Savuti park. Ronald had said it would be hard, and it is. 200km of roads that start badly improve for an instant, deteriorate, become laughable, get worse, then stop being funny. The worst roads are the ones where someone had tried to make them better, the best ones are just sand. It takes about 8 hours, and at the end of it we are exhausted. Worse, Savuti is a bowl of sand that used to be a marsh. It traps the heat and is unbearably dry and full of flies. We take a siesta and then a game drive. Luckily there is plenty of visual refreshment: elephants galore, zebra and even a pair of languid cheetah. The Savuti lions are famous for being elephant-hunters and there are plenty of stripped skeletons to prove it. Ronald tracks the lions skillfully by leaning out of the cab and reading prints in the sand. Finally we find our boys, chilling under a tree by a great watering-hole. Strange how we can be so close, arms and legs dangling out the game jeep and not appear to be canned food to them.

The interminable road to Savuti

Elephants squabbling over muddy waters

Baby zebra!

Giving us the eye

Handsome devil isn't he?

The next transfer takes us to Khwai, at the Eastern edge of the Okavango Delta. The season is such that the water levels are not at their peak, but there is plenty about in the permanent channels. It's not the waterworld we were expecting, but still very pleasant, with meadows and forest alternating with strange places ravaged by elephant and termite. The boss of our safari company joins us for dinner. He's a great white hunter type with a glass eye and a wealth of horror stories about stupid tourists and the excesses of hyaenas. He opens our ears to the sounds of the night; the frogs, hippos and lions calling across the camp.

Lucy's new friend

The bridge on the river Khwai

Up the Okavango without a paddle

Munkey

Hog!

Impala

The Khwai river, Okavango

Tsetsebi

Our man Ronald, celebrating another fine piece of tracking with a cuppa

Spooky Okavango treescape

Lionesses and their cubs, only weeks old

Hard at work as usual...

The magic hour near Xakanaxa in the Okavango

These stories seem to pass the 77 year-old Canadian by and she becomes bolder and sillier during the week. "Vy don't zese hippos do somesing? Give me somesing to srow at zem". (I should have pointed out that she is in fact an emigre from Germany). Later, the hippo duly pounces. If there is wandering off into the bush to be done, she wanders. If there is a lion to be provoked, she provokes it. If there are prats to be fallen, she falls them. Great fun!

Ronald assures us at the end of the safari, in which the only beast we haven't seen is a rhino, because there are no rhino where we've been, that we have been extremely lucky: it only rained on us once, and while were soaking we spent an hour with a leopard; we saw dozens of lion, and half-a dozen little cubs; we didn't get eaten by anything. We complete the trip with a flight from Xakanaxa (the x's pronounced as clicks) to Maun in a 6-seater Cessna. Above the bumpy tracks and confusing geometry of the elephant-scarred copses and meadows, the Okavango suddenly makes sense as a land defined by water. It's truly magnificent. We urge you to go!

One wet leopard marking its territory (spotters badge to me!)

The Okavango revealed

From Maun to Johannesburg and the Mbizi backpackers in the suburb of Boksburg. Our host and driver there, Patrick, rails against the prospect of Zuma and the 2010 World Cup. We try unsuccessfully to book a 28-hour rail trip to Cape Town and end up flying Mango to the Cape.

Auntie Edna is ready and waiting for us, with guest appearances from all manner of socialistas of the CT scene. The weather is nice and sunny so we take a bus tour of the city, ride the rotating cable car to the top of the Table and watch the strange flowing beauty of the tablecloth.

Lucy and my passports are dispatched in a hurry back to blighty for Angolan stamps, so we are now personae non granta in the country. My bro Grant and nephew Dylan are in accommodating mood and they lend us a motor, which we use to visit the end of the World at Cape Point. It's quite majestic landscape down here, a little like Scotland or the mountains of Portugal, but dropping directly into the Agulhas and Benguela currents. After a climb to the lighthouse at the top of Cape Point (Cabo das Tormentas), populated by cormorants, Italians, Brazilians and Chinese wearing pinstriped suits, we head towards the Cape of Good Hope and down the rickety steps to Dias beach nestled in the rocks. We run into the sea, and straight back out again. It's not like the North of Mozambique, but it's the sea nonetheless and blows away the cobwebs.

Beach flora, Noordhoek

Cape point

Dias beach

Next stop Antarctica

Lucy yanking

The cross of Vasco da Gama. Lucy is one proud Portuguesa

We drop in to Stellenbosch, which is like an Afrikaaner version of Guildford, and Franschoek, which could have been plucked from the Bourgogne. Both are crisp and tidy and a little bit twee, although Stellenbosch is redeemed a little by the students.

In the evenings there is normally one party or another to attend, with any number of interesting characters, who are all good sorts and happy to provide us with useful information for our onward journeys. Cape Town is quite a place!

CT style