My First Safari

The saddest part of my semester abroad was probably last Sunday night, driving from the Sir Seretse Khama airport into Gaborone. I had just spent a week up north in the Okavango Delta and the Kalahari Desert, and as I entered the city, it seemed like all the modern conveniences and achievements passing by me could not compare with all the things I had just experienced and seen.

The first night of my safari was spent in the Okavango Delta, the only inland delta in the world. We camped out in what was, in simplest terms, the “bush.” To get to our campsite, a dozen natives of the area piled me and the rest of my fellow travelers into mokoros, traditional canoes made by hollowing out tree trunks. (Later, I saw one of the trees used to make these, it does not seem like an easy task.) Two people fit into one mokoro, along with one standing poler in the back, who somehow navigated through the thick reeds that made it impossible to see anything in front of us.

Right before we reached out campsite, we started to hear grunting noises coming from very close by. The guide on my mokoro did not speak much English, but he was able to come up with “hippo,” as we looked frantically through the reeds. Thankfully, we never got close enough to see what it looked like—hippos are very territorial and cause most of the animal-on-human deaths in Africa—but we did hear it grunting throughout the night.

Luckily, I was able to see hippos from much farther away on the second part of my safari, in the Kalahari Desert. The first few nights we stayed at the Nxai Salt Pans, one part of the Kalahari, which is basically like an ocean with no water. They have almost no animals in them, because all of the salt makes the water there undrinkable. After dark, I was able to see the stars clearer than I had ever before, with the illuminating Milky Way going over my head from one horizon to the next, cutting the night sky in half.

Most of the time in the Kalahari was taken up with the ever-present “game runs.” These consisted of sitting in the back of an open-air truck, driving for eight to ten hours a day. Not exactly up to caliber with Hemingway or Kipling. Surprisingly, it was exhausting, bumping up and down on the dirt paths of the savannah. And worth it, I was able to see cheetahs, lions, hippos, elephants, and any type of antelope you could think of, some I didn’t even know existed.

The best part was that I got to see most of these animals close enough that they could have killed me if they wanted to. I did not know the power of a lion until I looked up through the windshield of my safari truck and saw one staring me in the face. I didn’t know how dangerous an elephant could be until one crossed the road about ten meters in front of the truck and turned to look at us, head on. For a split second, I thought that my life would end underneath the remains of a beige four-wheel drive, but instead of charging us, the elephant got scared, quickly turned and ran away faster than I thought an animal of that size could run.

The last night we stayed in the Makgadikgadi National Park, another part of the Kalahari. We camped on a cliff looking over a now-dried-up river, and as soon as I saw the view our site provided, I considered jumping over the cliff and living in one of the trees with the monkeys for the rest of my life. I then realized that I probably would die after four days on my own, so instead I just continued to look. The only thing I could see was miles and miles of savannah, miles and miles of trees and animals and birds and everything else I had experienced in the last week of my life. I watched thunderstorms roll over the landscape as the sun set, and my friends and I left only when we were told the lions would be coming out soon and we needed to get back into the protection of the main campsite.

It’s hard to think about my week long safari, because I know I won’t be back there for a while, if ever. It was an incredible experience, going to a place I didn’t even know existed six months ago and most people still don’t know exists. I hope that one day I will be able to return, somehow.