Dear all,
In which Ilana belatedly describes her September little jaunt to Botswana. Er, yes, that’s September. Sorry about that.
Anyway, it was one of those “do you chaps (that would be colleague fabulous graphic designer Ulrike and me) feel like going to Botswana in the next month?” “Okay but there’s Rosh Hashanah and then there’s Yom Kippur and then there’s...” “Okay, how’s this week then?” “Jolly good.”
So off we went – for a brief two days to Jao, two days to Mombo and then one overnight in Maun because we couldn’t get on a flight back to Joeys that day and the next day was Erev RH which allowed for a certain frisson of uncertainty: would Ilana make it back for the High Holies or would she be davening in Maun? I took a machzor just in case....
Anyway I made it back in time for shul, and here are a few bits and bobs of the trip finally. I had trouble putting it down on paper, perhaps because I had done that before, but it really was loverly to be back in the Delta.
So I won’t describe Jao Camp except to say that the rooms are enormous and, well, gorgeous. The main area is on two floors so you eat brunch and take tea upstairs looking out over a floodplain that was still inundated with the famous Okavango Flood. Whenever I looked up from fressing/slurping coffee, there was an elephant or three wading across the floodplain, their legs making a loud shushing noise against the reeds. And there's a troop of banded mongoose who sometimes hang out around the path to the loo so you have to wait for them to finish their sunbathing before going. An occupational hazard at Jao.
Just a note on the Flood with a capital F. I tell you this so that you too can say “Mah rabu maasecha Hashem” - how great are your works, God. Basically in African summer, rains come down in the highlands of Angola. No, I’ve never been there but I know this is true. How? Because the waters then flow down streams and rivulets and tributaries until these become the Kavango River and finally, a thousand kilometres from where they began, they reach the flatlands of northern Botswana, where they spread out, like the fingers on a hand, filling up little dents in the land to become the Okavango, largest inland delta in the world. The thing is, it takes months for the water to get there – so that when the rainy season is over, in about April, the waters start to flood in. Ironically, the dry season in the Delta is waterlogged.
And Jao is one of the most water-filled areas of the Delta. Water, water everywhere, the calming blue glinting liquid mirrored in perfect azure sky, waving of reeds and grasses, the lap-lap sound against everything – all this made Jao my new favourite place.
Truth is, the Jao staff became my favourites too when, as I stepped off the vehicle on our first day, a big man with a wide white smile introduced himself as, “I'm Jost. And you must be Ilana with all the kosher issues.” Yes, I'm sorry, I apologised, but don’t worry I said, hauling out my battered blue cooler box, it’s all in here. Jost took the cooler bag between finger and thumb with all the distaste of a butler being handed a dirty nappy. “Yes, I’ll take it to the kitchen but I don’t think you’ll be needing this.” He then led me away from the large kitchen (a good walk away from the camp in the staff area where you can bump into elephants but more of that later) to the special ‘tea’ kitchen which they have right next to the dining area. I gasped. A special table had been set up covered in a table cloth. On it was a gleaming set of cutlery, sharp knives, cutting board, pots, pans, brand new white plates, a washing up bowl... “all yours and new,” he said. “Oh and we haven’t used this oven here so we’ll make your stuff in it and only start using it afterwards for the guests...”
Damn they’re good!
So for once, just for once, Ilana did NOT eat tuna and provita but instead had all sorts of delicious stuff – grilled bream and veggies, fresh bread, couscous, lentils... and for once, she didn’t eat on a purple plate. While keeping kosher has never stopped me going anywhere as you know, it was wonderful just once to be part of the whole experience that our camps offer – and not have to explain my purple plate. (By the way, the same thing happened at Mombo – so my little cooler bag came back to Joburg unopened and a bit niffy.)
So, water. The area is what we call ‘inundated’ with the stuff. Which meant that when we needed to get anywhere – like visit the other camps in the area, we generally went by boat. Or if we were in a vehicle, said vehicle did a lot of underwater action, the whole front bonnet submerged. And often, all around us were the vast herds of lechwe feeding and shlushing through the water, which glinted so brightly in the afternoon sun, all we could see were their black outlines and diamond droplets flying through the air as they moved.
Boating instead of driving is definitely the way to go. Instead of sand roads through bush, thin ribbons of channels snake through a veritable jungle of reeds, so that the boat slides through dim green corridors made by ten-foot green stalks on either side that often lean towards each other to become a roof. Sitting at the front of the boat I look at the still-unbroken surface that mirrors the green reeds and blue sky so perfectly I feel like I’m flying through infinite space on a thin convex line that divides air and water, reality and illusion. Such stillness creates mirror images – trees, reeds and a fish eagle seemingly far below are in fact a non-real world, a world turned upside down.
The seeming tranquillity has its own challenges: reed and waterlily roots snagging the propeller requiring halts to unsnag it, hippos having temper tantrums (these two incidents hopefully not within the same space and time)... But it’s a game drive with squacco herons, jacanas and great white egrets standing in for impala and lechwe, exploding out of the plants and taking off as we chug past them. That living explosion of colour, the tiny malachite kingfisher takes the place of those insane emerald-spotted doves that fly manically in front of the vehicle for miles (I always find myself saying "get off the road and you can relax, idiot!" to them); here the malachites do the same with the boat, zooming ahead of it, flitting and flicking this way and that so fast, you can almost hear them laugh out loud at the sheer joy of flying.
You can relax, that’s the rave for today.
“Mind the elephant”
So now, about that elephant. I wrote this up as a blog but in case you missed it, here it is again.
So I was touring the back-of-house at Jao with Chris. That’s Jao manager Chris, not boss Chris or Kiwi Chris. (“Back of house” as you know is what it says it is – it’s the kitchen, the laundry, the generator, the staff village etc – and guests can visit and see exactly how they end up eating cuisine in the middle of nowhere.) Anyway, Chris is talking away explaining stuff as we walk along a wide sand road past the guides’ tents, when he suddenly veers off the road, saying, “let’s get off the road now shall we?” “Oh, okay,” I say (you should always listen to your guide no matter how odd it sounds) and follow him obediently a little way off the road onto the slope of a termite mound. “Why?” I ask. “Cos of the elephant,” he says.
Oh. Okay then.
I turned and looked and just across the road was an extremely tall pachyderm. I say ‘tall’ as I was about ten metres away but still had to look up at his head. He was chilled, munching away on a bush before wandering off to feed off the roofs of the guides’ tents (clearly one of the lesser spotted gardener elephants, this) – but discretion is the better part of valour when you’re a puny human.
We watched him for a while and I revelled in the freedom of watching one of the best creatures on Earth with only a modicum of respect between us – okay, a lot. And it just goes to show – even a big grey animal is hard to spot sometimes.
Jost a minute
I need to tell you about Jost Kabozu. In addition to being my personal kosher saviour, the perfect host and the smiling guide who boated us through the waterways wherever we wanted to go, I learned a little more about him. It’s a quintessential African story.
Jost was telling me how his kids had been to Jao and had enjoyed it very much. “How many do you have?” I asked. 14, he tells me. 14! “No, well, actually only eight are mine and my wife’s. My older brother died and I didn’t want his four children to be orphans, so we adopted them. Then my other brother died so we adopted his two as well.” What about the mothers? Well, he explained, the mothers would go on to marry other men and then possibly die so that the children are left with a step-family that often doesn’t want them – it was better this way, he says. And the mothers agreed. He then went on to say proudly that thanks to Wilderness (and to Patrick Swayze who was a guest once at Jao and connected with him, they kept in touch until he died) he has managed to send all ‘his’ children to school and even university and now has a son who’s a doctor and a daughter who’s a chemist!
Other Jao bits
So we did the sundowner thing, hanging out on a boat floating on the pink-satin water while the sun turned into a yellow ball and disappeared. (We were with a couple who insisted on us floating close to a pod of hippo to try ‘make them yawn.’ Not the most relaxing of activities you may agree.) And we did the mokoro thing, sliding through reed-frog-clasped reeds and lilac waterlilies one clear morning, with yet another biblically named poler – Isaac this time. Isaac ended it off by making us a waterlily necklace which looked quite avant garde until it dried up and sent out a bit of a whiff... still, a nice idea. We saw fish eagles in every second tree – I kid you not – and we watched Wattled Cranes (a very endangered species) dancing in the grass, a delicate and balletic courtship, long spindly legs bending in and out and wattles wobbling in time to music only they could hear.
We saw African skimmers, which always make any Wilderness person get all misty-eyed as our logo comes to life (all together now: “aaawww”). With their heavy bright red beaks, the lower mandible larger than the upper, they always look like they’re in the ‘special’ class when it comes to survival of the fittest – and sad to say, it’s true. They are a bit too picky about nesting as we found out – they need dried sandbanks but the flood had been so high this year that the banks were still covered with water when they needed to nest, so two pairs tried to use the side of the road for sandbanks while we were there. Guides carefully drove around the ‘nests’ – I use the word loosely as they were mere impressions in the sand with two eggs in each – but their care was to no avail; something came and killed the parents as they sat patiently on their unborn progeny.
So our stay at Jao was much, much too short. Like about six weeks too short. But what can you do, we had to leave. Our departure was made a little less sad however by the fact that we helicoptered out to Mombo.
You know you have arrived when you use the word ‘helicopter’ as a verb instead of a noun. It’s all rather upper class nose in the air to say “Well, dahling, we helicoptered from Jao to Mombo, dontcha know?” Lordie lordie what a way to go. The ground drops down with the suddenness of a lift and spreads rapidly out to become blue-green squiggles of water and island. Yet you’re still low and slow enough to see the details – reeds waving in the wind or the sitatunga (YES!) grazing, hidden and unaware, in the middle of them.
I love my job.
More on Mombo next time. PS, you can see some more pics on my facebook album here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=313519&id=782775306
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