AFTER that, all went well until we got to Tsoi. There we had to take the boat off the trailer in order to get out the tent. The inside of the trailer was a shambles.
One of our water carriers had sprung a leak and soaked the hardboard at the rear end. The hardboard, as might be expected, had not liked that kind of treatment and there was a gaping hole in it. Amazingly enough, only one thing was missing but, of course, it had to be one of our new gas cylinders.
I sometimes think that gas cylinders had something against us. Corrie once went on a hunting trip and lost two in one day.
We set up camp. Karen got very excited when she saw a third camp bed, but no cot, being hauled out of the Land Rover. “That my bed?” she asked and, when she had been assured that it was, she promptly lay down on it and refused to move until supper time.
Even then, she only changed position from lying to sitting, as if she were afraid that someone might whisk away her precious bed and demote her to cot status again. It was a good thing that she did take a liking to her bed, because that poor old cot had seen a lot of service and was now falling apart at the seams.
We moved on next day to Maun, at the southern end of the Okavango.
Rising in the highlands of Angola, the Okavango River crosses the border into Botswana just north of Shakawe and splits into five main and dozens of smaller distributaries. The total drop over the 450km from Shakawe to Maun is a mere 18 metres, so the waters do not necessarily carve themselves distinctive channels, but meander along the line of least resistance.
But it is not a swamp, despite the fact that it is commonly called one.
The water runs crystal-clear over white sand, the streams splitting around palm islands and rejoining to form deeper pools. The lagoons may be hundreds of metres wide; the channels joining them might take hippo only in single file. And everywhere the haunting cry of the fish eagle, lest you forget you are in Africa.
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