Pom Pom Camp and Chobe Safari Lodge

On this day, we took our final game drive with Partner. Game sighted on this morning drive included elephants, giraffe, tsessebes, and impala. We also saw a large troop of perhaps twenty baboons ambling along the tracks that a Land Rover had made in the grass. It was early and by following the tire tracks, they could stay out of the dew-saturated grass. We also saw lion tracks in the sand, but no lions.

The game drive and our stay at Pom Pom camp ended when we stopped at the edge of the same gravel landing strip we had landed on three days earlier. Five zebras galloped off the runway as we drove up and then stopped to graze about twenty yards off. Ibises and cranes waded through the marsh at the end of the runway, looking for fish.

Partner parked at the end of the runway and offered us a Coke from a cooler in the back of the Land Rover. “Since the plane isn’t here yet, I can tell you about how I spent some time in the U.S.,” he told us.

We were surprised. “You’ve been in the U.S.? What were you doing there?”

“I was there about two years ago. I worked there for about a year.”

“Where did you work?”

“I worked at Disney World.”

“What did you do?”

“I was Mickey Mouse.”

We believed him for a fraction of a second, only because Partner was normally serious. In fact, he had worked at Disney World for a year. Disney wanted to recruit people from Botswana to work in the African Safari part of Animal Kingdom at Disney World who were knowledgeable of the local fauna and flora who would also be able to act as Botswanan cultural representatives.

When Partner first heard of the opportunity for the job, he was reluctant to apply since he hadn’t finished high school. Finally though, two friends convinced him that they should all travel to Gaborone and apply for the job. When they got there, they discovered there were hundreds of applicants for the jobs. Again Partner was reluctant to go through with it and had to be convinced. There was a test. He aced that. The questions all dealt with the animals and plants that he was around every day. Not surprisingly, he did better on the test than those with more education who had spent all their lives in the city. The selection process went well into the night, but in the end, Partner was among the chosen few.

So he went to America and gained first-hand knowledge of culture shock and language barriers. When he first arrived, he wanted to get to a different floor in the airport and there were no signs directing him to the lifts. Later he found out that they are called elevators in the U.S. He asked for directions to the toilet, but when he followed those directions, he arrived at a door labeled “restroom” and was sure that the person he had asked hadn’t understood his question. The food in the U.S. was OK, but he longed for pap. While he could find things that were similar to pap, real pap was impossible to find.

But he made some good friends and when his year was up, they paid his travel expenses to Washington State and New York City. He wasn’t that interested in the natural areas of the U.S.—he could find that in great abundance in Botswana. But our cities amazed him.

Partner had to end his story of his travels when our plane arrived. He knew we were headed for the Chobe River Lodge, and as we left, he told us we should say hello to an instructor he’d had when he was studying to be a guide. His name was “Chop Man” he told us. Once again, as was the usual case with Botswanan names, we weren’t sure we’d heard it right.

The plane we boarded was a small prop driven job with seven passenger seats. The flight took a couple of hours, including a stop at another gravel landing strip in Okavango to pick up five more people at another game lodge—a quintet of Seventh Day Adventists who were relaxing at a game lodge after having helped build some clinics and schools in Mozambique.

The second half of the flight was rough and the airsick bags got a good workout in the back of the plane. We were all relieved while we finally landed at Kasane. As we approached Kasane, I was surprised to see a huge lake on the edge of town. I found out later that it was the Chobe River, which was in flood stage and well out of its banks, mostly on the north side of the river in Namibia.

The Flooded Chobe River from the Air

At the Kasane airport, a van from the Chobe Safari Lodge picked up the five Seventh Day Adventists, Kathy, and me. The safari lodge was right on the river and on the edge of Kasane. Its close proximity to town didn’t seem to detract from the wildlife experience. Warthogs were grazing on the lawn when we arrived (and later the very same ones or their cousins could be seen ambling down the streets of Kasane). We also observed a group of mongooses (mongeese? monguay? What’s the plural?) foraging in the undergrowth by the lodge. A sign in our room warned us that the crocodiles, hippos, and elephants would, on occasion, wander through the lodge grounds and were wild animals, not pets, and furthermore were very large and had huge nasty sharp teeth.

The Chobe Safari Lodge was huge and hotel-like, a shock after our Pom Pom experience. It has 46 hotel rooms, a cluster of “rondavels”, round traditional style freestanding huts (“huts” with indoor plumbing and air conditioning), and camping facilities. It also had a large restaurant, a bar, and a swimming pool. Our room could have accommodated an army. In addition to our bedroom with a king bed, there was a separate room with two bunk beds. We had a commodious bathroom and a deck facing the river.

Our Huge Room at the Chobe Safari Lodge

Our first activity at Chobe was to take a river cruise on a large riverboat owned by the lodge. There were probably fifty people on the boat—all lined up on folding chairs crowded onto the lower deck. There were families with crying children, and people clustered around the bar at one end of the boat who were obviously more interested in the bar than the river. There was also a guide who made a valiant effort to be heard above the cacophony of the throng. Chobe is home to the largest herds of elephants in Africa and they were numerous along the banks, wallowing in the mud and splashing each other and themselves with water. There were also large congregations of hippos. The guide would call attention to the animals and then give some detail about their ecology or behavior. He was, for the most part, ignored. There was no chance, in this large craft filled with people to observe the smaller mammals or birds. This was not a mokoro experience. I was annoyed that often I couldn’t hear what the guide was saying and felt sorry for him and wondered about his job satisfaction. Kathy and I asked him a number of questions, which turned into a conversation about the Chobe River and its wildlife. During this conversation, we noticed the name on his name badge was“Chapman”. This was “Chop Man” that Partner had asked us to say hello to. When we returned to the safari lodge, we went to the activities office at the lodge and arranged for a trip down the river for just the two of us in a small boat later in the week with Chapman as our guide.

Animals Viewed from the River Boat:  Above - Elephants, Below - Hippos