It was our third and final morning in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, an African Venice of winding waterways stitching together the largest inland delta system in the world. We’d been planning to pack up camp and begin our lazy, gliding passage back to civilization when G.B., our guide, came back with his excited report. Suddenly, the day was thrown off-kilter.
Ranger Rick, a.k.a Rick Wellbeloved-Stone, a high school science teacher from Charlottesville, was game for a pursuit. He was just days from a return flight to the dullness of Dulles, and he wanted feats of daring and bush bravado to awe his students with back home. Excitedly following the paw prints scattered around the campsite, he and G.B. were already charting the path most likely to bring us within a couple of whiskers of our leonine prey.
It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I’d signed up for our trip, a three-day mokoro, or canoe, safari through the placid channels and lagoons of the Okavango. The delta — the crown jewel of Botswana’s wilderness circuit — stretches across nearly 6,000 square miles of wetlands in the country’s fertile north, fed by the waters of the Okavango River, which begins its journey in the highlands of Angola and flows for 1,000 miles before emptying into the delta’s countless tributaries. At the peak of its seasonal flooding, which occurs during the dry season in July and August, the delta swells to nearly three times its normal size. On the hundreds of islands that dot its waters you’ll find one of the greatest concentrations of wildlife in Africa. Game crowds in from miles around: elephants, zebras, kudus, gazelles, buffaloes and, yes, more than a few lions.
The delta is as extraordinary as it is unlikely in Botswana, nearly 70 percent of which is covered by the Kalahari Desert. When I visited during dry season last August, most of the landscape was arid and bleak — a drab palette of yellows, browns, grays. Traveling from the capital, Gaborone, in the south, we drove for hours through desert that cast a monotonous spell: nothing but sky and earth and flat, dry plains covered in scrub brush, with only the odd listless frontier town to break up the journey. We arrived in Maun, Botswana’s tourism capital, like a desert caravan reaching some palm-filled oasis. The city was green, the trees hung with the delicate nests of weaver birds. The streets were clogged with Range Rovers and Land Cruisers shuttling ruddy Western tourists to their three- and four-star hotels.
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