Diamonds (and Family) Are Forever

Here in Botswana Ani and I have been privileged to have many surreal experiences—from bungee jumping to village life—however, one of the more bizarre moments of this semester was walking down the streets of Gaborone with my parents. Only a week ago my mom and dad arrived on a Friday evening, pale not only from the exhausting fourteen hour flight, but also the distinct lack of glaring Botswana sun. We set them up at the Lolwapa Lodge, a small little place right across the street from UB. We spent Saturday doing a whirlwind tour of Gaborone; a day that included several trips to Riverwalk, a visit to Main Mall and the bus rank, and several cups of coffee (we had a brief moment of panic when it became apparent that coffee was not a readily available commodity in Bots). Naturally, no trip would have been complete without some testing of the local cuisine.

Let the record show my father flipped out more at the prospect of eating this worm than I did!

After a nice, dried worm you need a fatcake to wash it down!

However, in the end, I was more of an excuse to visit Botswana than the full purpose and so on Sunday my parents jetted off to the Okavango Delta for their own little safari. From all accounts, they had a wonderful time. Theirs was a walking tour, which means that they were spared the bumpy roads and day-long drives that we experienced. It also meant they had to walk for extended periods of time – you will have to weigh the costs and benefits yourself.

Back in Gabs, Ani, myself and the rest of CIEE took Wednesday off of school to visit Jwaneng Diamond Mine, the richest diamond mine in Botswana. Botswana’s economy is built on diamonds. As I may have mentioned before, when Botswana gained independence from the British back in 1966, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. Only a few years later, diamonds were discovered (conveniently!) and they have since funded all of the rapid development around the country. So they’re kind of a big deal. The mine itself is about two hours from Gaborone, located in what is largely the middle of nowhere.

It is also huge.

It’s an open mine that’s over three hundred metres deep. To put that in perspective, the bridge off of which Ani and I jumped was 111 metres. So this mine is three times as deep. To visit the mine we all had to get dolled up in these lovely outfits:

Yeah, we’re hot (literally).

The highlight of the trip was a visit to the trucks that haul the rubble up from the mine.

Ani and I were almost crushed!

Unfortunately for those of us hoping a diamond mine might include a glittering array of diamonds, diamond mines are not really the place to see the jewels. It’s illegal for anyone to sell an uncut diamond, so they are largely kept under lock and key as they are washed and filtered through the waste. They then go to a plant in Gabs where they are processed and cut. For those doing the math, our visit to the diamond mine coincided with Saint Patrick’s Day – a holiday that, for some reason, seems much more important when you are surrounded by people who don’t celebrate it. So many of us spent this trip decked in green.

Jen models her (hand drawn) tat

My parents returned on Thursday night and I spent Friday shameless exploiting them for groceries, souvenirs, and free meals. Thank you again, guys! All too soon it was time for them to go. Now they’re back in Fort Collins where my dad just had a snow day. I can only imagine how surreal the week must have seemed to them!

Quick! Before the hyenas come...

Perhaps the place for which Botswana is most famous is the Okavango Delta. The Delta is located in the northern part of the country—an oasis of water and greenery above the Kalahari desert that otherwise dominates the country. So it was in the Delta that Ani and I (joining the rest of our CIEE crew) spent the remainder of our spring break. After our two day rest at the “Old Bridge” Backpackers in Maun, Ani and I met up with our fellow CIEEers (and Batsi, of course!) to pile into our game drive vehicles that our guides drove into the Delta.

Most of CIEE from top to bottom, left to right: Allie, Emma, Sophie, (down) Shelley, Ani, Jen, and then Isabelle in the left-hand corner :)

One of the many hazards of the road.

To get into the Delta it’s a pretty long and bumpy ride unless you’re flying in on a private jet (real option); it’s about four hours over half of which is unpaved. Because we were coming in the rainy season the roads were riddled with small to rather large lakes of water through which our hardy jeeps had to drive.

These look deceptively shallow - trust me when I say they are not!

They were also riddled with this lion – a rare sighting during the rainy season though you wouldn’t know it to look at him as he relaxes on the road:

Just chillin'

There is a joke about many of the roads around here and in Livingstone that only drunk drivers drive straight. After much swerving, bouncing, and splashing we arrived at our campsite to enjoy a lovely sit-down dinner. Safari begun! We all slept two to a tent with comfy bedrolls that convinced me that my parents had been stingy on the camping mattresses when I was a child. We didn’t get to enjoy the sleep for long though because our first game drive began around 6AM the next morning. A game drive is exactly what it sounds like – you drive around looking for animals. And despite the rainy season not being prime-animal spotting time, we saw plenty! Unfortunately, my camera died early on in our Okavango trip. Luckily, our friend Sophie has generously allowed me to steal her photos and, even luckier, her camera is superior to mine. Here is just a small sample of the animals we saw:

Zebra! (famous for giving tourists their other end in photos, but captured here!)

Water-buffalo Crossing

First there was one elephant...

Then two...

Then three! Look at the little baby!

Impalas are EVERYWHERE in the Delta (as are termite hills and monkeys!)

Much like the elephants, hippos have a way of multiplying...

They're watching you...

Although adorable with their small ears rising out of the water, it bears remembering that hippos are known killers - they can take down a crocodile.

There were also some pretty great birds. These are guinea fowl.

And these are just adorable!

These gorgeous little birds liked to fly next to our jeeps, presumably enjoying the air stream generated by them

Cheetah spottings (haha) are very rare, so we were lucky to catch this fellow!

The babies were out in full force during our trip!

Family grooming/snack time!

In case your quota of cute hasn't been filled yet! We came across a tree that had about twenty of these little babies scampering around in it. A monkey daycare center!

In honor of Botswana's love of the zebra (it symbolizes black and white harmony), we conclude this picture fiesta with one last group photo.

In addition to driving we also went on what is known as a mokoro ride. A mokoro is a small canoe that was used in Botswana long before motor boats arrived on the scene (although we also got to ride one of those so that we might safely venture into hippo-inhabited waters). The canoes were traditionally made from a single tree trunk, but ours were modern and therefore some form of plastic. The Delta has a number of small channels that run through the long, bamboo-like grass and it was through these waterways that our guide poled. A Botswana gondola ride, if you will!

Hippo-proof (sort of...) boat

Less-hippo-proof boats

Shot from the mokoro

Lilies of the Delta

One final animal shot!

In total we were in the Delta for two full days and three nights before we had to return to UB, classes, and “real life.” And while things continue to go well here in Gabs, I freely admit that it was hard to leave this grassland haven of elephants, giraffes, zebras, monkeys (baby monkeys!) and more. Fortunately for me, my parents arrived Friday night for their own trip to the Delta and to visit their wandering daughter. Perhaps after this week they can confirm my evaluation of the Delta as a fantastic safari experience!

Defying Gravity

I am writing this post by hand from a tent, though by the time I finally post it to you I will have been in several other tents and finally returned to my dorm room at UB. However, it seemed important to me to put pen to paper (literally!) at this point in Ani and my spring break to preserve my memories while they’re still fresh. After a relaxing Friday evening and Saturday morning Ani and I made our way to the bus rank in Gabs to catch our bus at 7pm Saturday evening. When we arrived we discovered that a group of UB exchange students who we knew but were not associated with any program had joined together to make the same trip to Victoria Falls that Ani and I had planned. Joining forces we all settled down in our discretely colored bus for the fourteen hour drive.

The Bus

For those trying to recall their southern Africa geography, Victoria Falls straddles the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe and lies to the northeast of Botswana. So to reach our destination we had to cross the border in Zambia – a process that involves less than five minutes of paper work and over an hour of loading and unloading the bus.

Some stuff that was unloaded…and reloaded…

First you unload everything at the border of Botswana, where you reload everything onto a new bus. That bus in then ferried across the river to the Zambian border where everything is unloaded so the bus can drive ten feet over the border and the stuff carried by hand back into the bus. Thankfully, the river is pretty. With our newly stamped passports, we arrived in Livingstone (yes, named after the same Livingstone after which everything else in southern Africa is named. The man got around). We stayed at what must be one of the most charming, quirky hostels in Zambia:

The place itself

The officially titled “Chill-out Zone” where backpackers read and pet the cats. Yes, there were cats.

Outdoor pool for further relaxation purposes

Granted, Hemingway probably was speaking of a position of extreme luxury, benefitting from all sorts of colonialism when he wrote this, but it’s a nice sentiment.

Very reasonably priced, Jollyboys set us up in a room with a total of sixteen people, mostly Scandinavians, all of whom seemed to have decided to do research in Zambia. Exhausted from our rather lengthy bus adventure, Ani and I spent Saturday afternoon relaxing before going on something called the “Sunset Cruise” –dinner, snacks, and an open bar with an evening down the river.

She’s on a boat!

It was kind of pretty

These birds apparently live in the side of the riverbank! (Note: black spots are birds)

Saw our first hippos! (More of those to come in the next blog post!)

True to the name of the cruise, the sun set

And was very idyllic

As you can tell, I’m tempted to fill this whole blog post with nothing but photos; however, for the sake of a coherent story, I’ll refrain. Suffice it to say that the evening was beautiful, relaxing way to introduce ourselves to this corner of Zambia. While on the cruise, we met a young woman named Jen who is doing an internship for the semester in Livingstone working on HIV/AIDS and infant care. In addition to being able to tell us how many kwacha we should be paying for a cab (kwacha is the Zambian currency –its smallest bill (they don’t have coins) is 100, approximately $00.01, so the conversion math gets tricky), she also suggested we join her and her friend John for dinner Monday after we saw the Falls. Cell-phone-less, Ani and I agreed to engage in some old fashioned “leave it to fate” planning. Which brings us to Monday, one of the crazier days in my life. You see, the night before, Ani and I booked ourselves a bit of a daredevil activity to commemorate our visit to Victoria Falls: bungee jumping. With one other UB friend, we took ourselves Monday morning to the bridge across the Falls, pausing only to briefly sign away our lives!

We jumped off this

Ani is surprisingly calm in her decision

I was much more excitable

I only (only!) signed up for the bungee, but Ani, showing an adrenaline-junkie side hitherto unrealized, went for the combo. So she first ziplined across the Falls—a “tame” trip where she could even hold onto her camera, before we went to the center of the bridge.

Zooming off into the distance

Did I mention the view from the bridge?

Here at least, the photos speak for themselves:

Preparing to jump!

There she goes!

All that stood between us and the fall :)

One last wave!

And I'm off!

I can see the bottom!

Mission accomplished!

I’ll admit, standing on the edge of that bridge with the cheerful jump-dude counting “5, 4, 3…” I questioned my sanity. And as I dropped I realized I had, quite possibly, made the most foolish decision of my life: I was willing falling 111 meters face first, attached to life by nothing but my ankles. I was going to die and it was going to be embarrassingly self-inflicted (the warranty I’d signed guaranteed I’d have no one to blame but myself!). By all accounts (and the video I bought to forever record this moment) I gave a rather blood-curdling scream. Chalk it up to years of working on breath support. But when the cord caught and I began bouncing through the air rather than simply free0falling it stopped being terrifying and became (cheesy as it sounds) magical. After all, I was essentially flying in the middle of Victoria Falls. Undoubtedly, the adrenaline high did a lot for the moment, but it was truly an incredible experience and not one that I regret in the least. To round off her combo, Ani ended the morning with a gorge swing – essentially like the leap you do on a ropes course, except (can I emphasize it enough?) from 111 meters. All in all the entire stint made for an incredible and literally breathtaking start to the day.

Yes, start, because after jumping off them, we went to officially view the Falls.

We went this way!

Once again, photos may surpass me in conveying this world wonder. The Falls are huge, powerful, thundering, misting, giants. In the words of this website I found online (official research happening here): “To the Tonka people, such an awesome spectacle could only mean that this was the domain of God. To David Livingstone, 'a scene so lovely must have been gazed upon by angles in their flight'. To modern man, that scenic phenomenon is one of the world's greatest miracles: the majestic, unrivalled Victoria Falls. Declared a World Heritage Site, the falls (and much of the town of the same name) within a 23,4km national park, which neighbours onto the 573km Zambezi National Park. Today, Victoria Falls remains as evocative a destination as it did to the hunters, surveyors, explorers and missionaries of the 19th Century.”

After gaping at the Falls from a distance, we went closer, which—given the amount of mist the Falls produce—translates from ‘closer’ to ‘into them.’ As one Zambian man said to me upon entry into the park: “Enjoy your free shower”

Soaking wet, but still in awe, I joined two of the UB guys for a short hike down to what is known as the “Boiling Pot.” Here, the water that has churned its way over the Falls runs under the Knife Bridge to whirl in a furious pool at the foot of the bridge off of which Ani and I had jumped earlier that day.

In addition to once again being overwhelmingly beautiful, the area is also completely owned by the vary sizeable baboon population that inhabits the Falls. We were reduced to clapping (rather ineffectually) at them to clear the path or skirting hesitantly around them – well-aware that it was their benevolence alone that kept them from jumping us, their rather weaker cousins.

Indeed, while we were up at the drier part of the Falls, Ani discovered not all baboons were so placid. As she leaned over to look at the Falls, she felt someone tugging on her purse. Convinced it was a concerned fellow hiker trying to pull her back, Ani turned to reassure them only to discover a baboon gamely trying to steal her purse. However, the baboon met more resistance than I think he anticipated because Ani, all too aware of the passport, credit cards, and money in that purse and armed with a semester of self-defense, dug in her heels and won her tug-of-war with the mischievous (and rather strong) creature. Needless to say, the novelty of the baboons quickly wore off.

Several hours later we had finally dried from the mists of the Falls and decided to make our way to the Royal Livingstone Hotel to meet Jen and John. The Royal Livingstone is an incredibly posh hotel that more than anything seems to harbor a deep nostalgia for the days of British imperialism in its safari decadence. Still slightly damp in soggy tennis shoes, we didn’t really look the part of residents nor could we have afforded a dinner there. Undeterred by these realities, we sat down athe bar to at least order a drink and watch the sun set over the Falls (that’s right, you can see the Falls from this hotel—told you it was swanky).

Gorgeous Falls

As luck would have it, we did find Jen and John who allowed us to join them at (of all places) an Italian restaurant called Olga’s where, in addition to serving good pizza, part of the profits go to educational programs in Livingstone. Exhausted, we tumbled into bed after an amazing day—but only for a handful of hours. Following my father’s maxim that “You can sleep when you’re dead” (the logic of which Ani protests vehemently), we left our lovely Jollyboys the next morning at 4:30 am to catch the bus back to Botswana. Recrossing the border, Ani and I hitched a ride to the village Kasane (cas-an-eh) with our fellow UB students (who had organized their own safari through the Chobe to the Delta) and then made our way to the Kasane airport, where we had booked a flight to Maun only two days before. Maun is one of the entry towns to the Okavango Delta where on Thursday we will rendezvous with the rest of CIEE for our safari. Flights from Kasane to Maun are actually caper and more practical than bussing it, but this particular flight only goes Tuesday and Thursday, which is why Ani and I ended up at the tiny airport with six other people and a miniature plane.

Picture to scale

45 minutes later (during which I successfully avoided throwing up despite the bumpy takeoff and landing inherent to small planes) we were on the road to a new hostel: the “Old Bridge” Backpackers, an off-the road place with a quiet, very relaxed atmosphere (and free tea!). In preparation for our stay in the Delta (and in deference to our finances!) Ani and I are using the hostel’s tents, which brings me to the beginning of this post.

Ani, in her first tent overnight!

It has been a surreal couple of days –in fact, I can hardly believe even now that we crammed so much in! It is a feeling I anticipate will continue as we make our way into the Delta to hippos, lions, giraffes, and more! Stay tuned!