Friday, 31 January 2020 - Botswana
Breakfast at 6.30 a.m. and at about 7 a.m. we headed out to the place which arranged day tours out to the delta. There we had to sit in a safari and as it was already full in front I had to sit right at the back which made for difficult climbing and horrible bumpiness when we went off road. I had trouble getting off the safari as well, because I had to come down backwards which is not my favourite thing to do. I prefer seeing where I’m going, thank you.
But anyway. We then reached what is called the poling station where the polers are. They are our guides for today. They were born and bred in the delta and now work as tour guides there; they will take us in a mokoro and then go around some of the islands. Here I had to pee in the bushes as there were no toilets around. Clever calls this ‘bushy-bushy’ 😁.
The mokoro is something like a sampan. In those days it was made of wood but due to deforestation, they are now made of fibre glass. In the times of the British they called it a ‘dug-out canoe’ but after independence they changed its name to the local language. It made me think, the people of yesteryears although separated by continents, cultures, language etc, thought alike because in Africa there is the mokoro and in Asia you have the sampan.
Only 2 people can sit in the mokoro and the poler who is also our guide stood at the back with a long pole to steer the mokoro through the Okavango River (hence, poler and poling station). There has been no rain as expected (usually around September to March) so the river is running low and the delta is pretty dry. Unlike Etosha where it is good for it to be dry because you can then find the animals easily at waterholes, it is not good for the delta to be dry because then it is difficult to find animals as they wander around looking for water; and the delta is really vast, about 18,000 square km. If there is enough water there will be animals everywhere. How sad for me. When the river is full it can be anywhere between 3-6 metres deep.
I shared the mokoro with Jette. Our guide’s name is Emanuel. No thanks to Clever and Taro I was scared to move lest the mokoro topple over and I drown in the Okavango River. Plus Emanuel is so skinny I wasn’t sure whether he could keep the balance of the mokoro with both me and Jette in it. But it wasn’t that bad and once you get used to it you even forget you’re on the water. The scenery was just breathtaking - the beauty and serenity of an intricate and serene system of lily covered and reed lined channels which opened up into beautiful lagoons.
I picked up a river snail and a clam and after photographing them, placed them right back into the river. There were many, many birds that I saw here; among others the African fish eagle, white egrets, a humming bird, the Great White Egret (the biggest egret here), herons, open bill storks which eat snails as their beaks are suitable to break the shell, African jacanas (longish beak to grab plants like water lilies), African datas, Goliath herons, a red bill hornbill (I never knew there were hornbills in Africa!), reed cormorants (black) and a white breasted cormorant.
Some of the plants I saw here were the bull rush grass, the common reed (very tall and can be used for construction eg to build huts), water lilies aplenty (so pretty 😍!), fox tail sage which grows on land (with a thick stem) and cross hair sage which grows in the water (the stem is hollow) which both look the same, and a variety of submerged plants which are weeds. Some of these plants act as a natural filter, making the water clear so that you can see the bottom of the river. The locals collect this water to drink.
I also saw small fishes, butterflies, dragonflies and other insects. Some noise in the distance which were hippos! We stopped on one of the islands and walked across it where we saw a pod of hippos swimming in a small lake on the island, but they refused to get out of the water. I saw a hippo skull and Emanuel says hippos do not have natural predators (although once in a while a lion gets them) so most likely this unlucky fellow injured himself and then couldn’t find his own food and eventually died 😔.
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