Maun & Pom Pom Camp

Tswana is a melodic language, and I noticed that Tswana speakers speak English with a melodic flair. R’s, for instance, get a hard roll-almost like a series of rapid D’s. It may be that Tswana speakers have trouble distinguishing between D’s and R’s. If that is the case, it would explain why so many people have trouble with Madeline’s name. Since so many people have issues with the pronunciation, Madeline, in certain situations, refers to herself as “Maddy.” Then, with the D sound becoming an R, “Maddy” becomes “Mary.” Thus, Madeline, in concession to the linguistic difficulty, refers to herself as Mary in those situations.

One of those situations is when she deals with taxis. She maintains a list of numbers for taxi companies on her cell phone. When she needs a taxi, she calls one of those numbers and says, “This is Mary. I need a taxi to go from the University to River Walk.” A half-hour later, if the taxi hasn’t shown up she calls the number again and says, “This is Mary. I called a taxi a half hour ago and it isn’t here yet. Sorry?... Sorry?....No, Mary. Sorry? To River Walk. Sorry? No I’m GOING to River Walk. Right now I’m at the University. Sorry? No, Mary. Ten minutes? OK.” Then in a half hour if the taxi still has not arrived, she will call a different taxi company and start over. Taxis, we soon discovered, have reliability issues.

Thus, I was more than a little concerned about our ability to get to the Gaborone Airport. Our scheduled flight to Maun on this day departed at 7:15, which meant a taxi pickup around 5:45. We had arranged a taxi the previous day, but if it didn’t show up, we would have no way of calling the taxi company, since we didn’t have cell phones and the Lolwapa’s phone could only receive calls, not call out. So I fretted about that periodically, but needn’t have. The taxi was outside the hotel a few minutes before we were ready and we got to the airport in plenty of time, and then we were airborne on a small Air Botswana prop-driven plane for the hour-and-a-half flight to Maun.

The flight took us north across the edge of the Kalahari Desert and then into the unique riparian phenomenon known as the Okavango Delta. Maun is located right on the edge of the Okavango. The Okavango River flows south out of Angola, across the Caprivi Strip of Namibia, and finally into Botswana. Shortly after entering Botswana, the river spreads out into a maze of channels and marshes until it is finally totally consumed by the sands of the Kalahari. It is referred to as “the river that never finds the sea.” In the wet season, much of the delta is marsh. As the dry season progresses, the marsh gradually shrinks to individual waterholes, some of which dry up completely. The Okavango is a haven for wildlife, and as the dry season advances, the wildlife becomes very concentrated around the remaining sources of water. The Moremi Game Reserve takes up much of the Okavango, but there are also numerous private concessions surrounding Moremi. We were headed for one of them.

At the Maun airport, we were met by the pilot of a small four-seater plane. We transferred to his plane for the twenty-minute flight to Pom Pom Camp. There are no roads in the Okavango, so flying is the only way to get there. From the air, we could see the marshes, channels, and islands of the Okavango. We also saw numerous towering termite mounds and (gasp!) elephants and giraffe.

We were met at the gravel landing strip by Peter and Paul, two guides from Pom Pom. This apostolic duo hoisted our bags into a Land Rover and we followed a dirt track for a ten-minute drive that ended by crossing a narrow wooden bridge onto the island where Pom Pom camp is located.

Pom Pom has an open-sided thatched main building that contains a small lounge area, a large table for communal meals, a bar and a small gift shop. Guests stay in nine luxurious platform tents. Our tent opened onto a small deck that faced the lagoon. There was a king bed in the tent, a wardrobe for our clothes behind that, and in the back of the tent, a toilet and sink. A door at the back of the tent opened into a shower area that was enclosed on all sides, but open to the sky. There were small electric lights in the tent, which would work when the generator was running at night.

Since we arrived around 9 AM, we had time to ourselves for unpacking and getting situated before the 10 AM brunch. Brunch was yogurt, fruit juices, salads, coffee and tea, home baked bread, and made-to-order eggs, bacon, and sausages cooked over an outdoor griddle. The food at Pom Pom was phenomenal and plentiful. Game viewing activities occurred when the animals were most active, at sunup and sundown, and the rest of the time was filled with five meals. The schedule ran something like this: 5 AM, get up & eat breakfast; 6 AM morning activity; 10 AM brunch; 11 AM siesta; 4 PM tea; 4:30 PM afternoon activity; 6 PM, break in afternoon activity for sundowner drinks and snacks; 8 PM supper.

After brunch, we sat on our deck, read our books, and photographed the friendly arrowhead babblers (birds) and vervots (monkeys) that lived in the tree above our tent. The babblers would fly down to our deck and babble at us, while the monkey would sometimes jump onto the roof of the tent and scamper across and other times sit on a limb and watch us.

There was a self-service bar in the main building, so I ambled down there at one point for a beer. There are a number of beers made in southern Africa. St. Louis beer is brewed in Gaborone. Windhoek, an interestingly yellow pils is made by Germans in Namibia. South Africa makes any number of beers. I was not enamored with any beer I quaffed on this trip. Perhaps because of the climate, all the beers I tried were light-bodied lagers. Most of them had the flavor of your average Bud. Disappointing any way you look at it.

On my foray to the bar, I met the managers of the camp. They told me that they were a little confused because they had received two sets of reservations with the same last name & first initials. And they were not duplicates—another couple sharing our last name and first initials was staying in another tent at the same camp as we were, at the same time! Doppelgangers!

At four, we had tea and then went on our first game drive. Our guides for our stay at Pom Pom were Partner and Dalton. When Peter and Paul had picked us up at the airstrip, they had informed us that our guide would be Partner, but because of their accent and the unlikelihood that his name was really Partner, we weren’t sure what his name really was. Were they saying, “Padma?” Was he Indian? No, he was African, and his name really was “Partner.” I suspect that the names we called our guides were not their real names, but perhaps English names and words that somewhat approximated their real names, because we would mangle the pronunciation of their real names—the reverse of the Madeline/Mary phenomenon.

The game drive was in an open-sided Land rover. The other couple with whom we shared the vehicle were a young couple from Australia, Ryan and Kirsten. Our Doppelgangers! The other guests at Pom Pom were French and German. We didn’t run into many Americans. Africa is just so far away from the U.S.!

On this drive, we saw photographed many birds including a hammerkop, large, colorful saddlebacked storks, cattle egrets, blacksmith lapwings, and a host of others. We also saw red lechways, kudus, and tsessebes, all large ungulates, as well as zebras and giraffes. No lions. At six, we stopped for sundowner drinks, and then continued for a couple hours in the dark looking for leopards. At one point Kathy yelled at Partner to stop & back up, sure that she had seen a leopard. When Dalton swung the spotlight, there, looming out of the darkness was a stump. Kathy is convinced to this day that there was a leopard there and if we had backed up further we all would have seen it.