This is our first attempt at editing video pieces. It’s a bit rough – we’re still learning – but let me know what you think. Advice and comments are very welcome!
Our previous videos can be seen here.
Over the next week, I’m going to try to improve this site to make it easier to navigate, and try using maps to show our journey, so check back.
Posted in Africa, Biodiversity, Food security, Malawi, Travel | 6 Comments »
Sitting outside my window
She’s about a foot tall, she sleeps a lot and we’ve named her Frida, after Frida K(o)ahlo.
It’s incredibly distracting having what is essentially a teddy bear sitting in the gum tree outside the window. I keep having to go outside simply to stare up at her. She is mostly still, but on occasion she’ll scratch or reach up for a leaf to chew. Sometimes she’ll shift herself up the tree a little further to avoid direct sunlight or reach better leaves and probably to relieve a numb bum.
We’re staying in my cousin Margi’s farmhouse near Lismore in northern New South Wales, where, like everywhere else in the country, koala numbers are declining. The slow-moving creatures are threatened by habitat removal, cars, dogs and now by climate change. The situation is so bad that in a report released at the Copenhagen summit, some experts predicted the animals will be extinct within 30 years.
Koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus – ‘ash-coloured bear with a pouch’) are found nowhere but Australia and despite appearances are not bears but marsupials, most closely related to the wombat. Looking at Frida, it’s easy to imagine that the Australian government has invented this iconic animal as a marketing ploy, strategically placing cuddly toys high up in the eucalyptus branches around the country. The versions on sale in tourist gift shops certainly look the same, and are about as active. However, for the purposes of this article, we’ll go along with the deception and accept that it’s a real animal – fossil evidence shows koalas to have been in the country for at least 20 million years.
During this period, the furry creatures have evolved a highly specialised, finely tuned digestive system that enables them to survive on a diet that consists entirely of toxic eucalypt leaves with very low nutritional value. Koalas have a specially adapted stomach and liver, and a 2-metre-long caecum (a kind of appendix) to cope with their specialised diet. This bizarre evolutionary direction – early koalas were less fussy and enjoyed a range of rainforest flora – is often talked up by scientists as a wonderful example of niche exploitation. But it is making the fluffy climbers more stupid, as a consequence. Whereas their ancestors’ brains once filled their cranial cavities, researchers exploring the fluffy depths of modern koalas found the brain’s two cerebral hemispheres to be like “a pair of shrivelled walnut halves on top of the brain stem, in contact neither with each other nor the bones of the skull. It is the only animal on Earth with such a strangely reduced brain”. Brains do require a lot of protein and energy to function, and eucalypt leaves do not an intellectual make. Still, just how much brain power does a sleeping, eating teddy bear need?
Would it really matter if we lost such a stupid animal?
Most of the people that become experts in their field are pretty passionate about their subject, and scientists are no exception. But Steve Phillips, who is perhaps the world’s foremost koala expert, is actually fighting back tears as he describes the plight of his study creatures. “The world would be a duller place. It would be a tragedy to lose the koala, not just because they are such lovely gentle animals, but because in condemning the koala we are condemning ourselves. We are just another animal: first the koala goes, then we go…” he says. The problem is not that they are stupid – in fact, they are very intelligent and live in complex social hierarchies that rival gorilla communities, Steve insists. (Questions have been raised about whether the skull autopsies were performed on deceased individuals, meaning that their Homer Simpson-like intelligence is not representative of other brainier koalas.) 
The problem is that we humans are stressing out the koalas – and koalas have not evolved a way of dealing with stress. They have had few predators during the past few million years: they may have been preyed on by thylacines (a stripy marsupial dog that went near-extinct a couple of thousand years ago with the arrival of the dingo); wedge-tail eagles and powerful owls hunt koala joeys, as do pythons. But there isn’t evidence to suggest that the aboriginal people ever hunted them – in fact, Steve set out to find out how tasty koalas are, following an autopsy of one, and declares that they are nasty to eat, “stringy, rangy. You’d have to be pretty desperate,” he concludes.
European arrival led to large swathes of their trees being felled for the timber industry and for agricultural clearance, forcing them into ever smaller areas. Then there was the fur industry, which exterminated millions of the fellas and wiped them out completely in South Australia. Cars run over thousands every year – they cross the roads slowly – and feral and domestic dogs attack them. Those that don’t die from their injuries suffer a delayed stress response that commonly manifests itself as an outbreak of chlamydia or retrovirus, both of which can be carried asymptomatically in a healthy animal. Chlamydia causes ‘dirty tail’ (incontinence), conjunctivitis and often leads to infertility and blindness. Retrovirus causes cancers and an Aids-like immunodeficiency (which is similar to a leukaemia that effects gibbons). Both are killing koalas in large and annually increasing numbers.
And these stress-induced sicknesses are much more prevalent in areas where their habitat and its important eucalypt trees have been encroached on by humans, either by development or for agriculture, or made inhospitable by climate change. Koalas are disappearing from the high ridges in NSW because years of sustained droughts have caused the eucalyptus trees there to become even less nutritious – they kick in a water-conserving metabolic mechanism that leads to far greater concentration of toxins and tannins in their leaves and reduced production of young juicy leaf. And global warming is also killing the koalas. They have not evolved a method of cooling themselves like other marsupials, and so they overheat and die or seek ground cover, which makes them more vulnerable to dog attacks. The increase in bush fires is also taking its toll – around 70% of koalas in a forest will die in a fire.
“Koalas have already experienced a major range contraction and this is only getting worse,” Steve says. “I don’t think that they will become extinct in 30 years, but I think that they will only remain in a few small pockets. It means that the next generation is unlikely to see koalas in the wild.”
There have been reintroduction efforts, in South Australia, Victoria and even WA, but these have all been bred from just three individuals introduced to Kangaroo Island, and so do not have the healthy genetic variety of wild types.
Looking out at Frida as she sits with her bottom snugly held at a fork in the branches, it’s hard not to break into a smile and incredibly sad to realise that such a viewing is becoming ever rarer. Koalas sit up like little people, they are almost the only animal other than primates to have fingerprints (which are almost indistinguishable from human prints), they have opposable digits (actually two fused opposable ‘thumbs’) and they’re very cute. Humans can live in harmony with koalas by being more thoughtful: keeping dogs restrained in rural areas; planting their favourite dinner; driving with especial caution between 10 pm and 11pm (when they are most active) and dawn; and approaching development sensitively with their needs in mind. And, tackling climate change.
Everyone needs a teddy bear.
*Regular readers may have noticed a bit of a gap between postings on the site – sorry for the long silence. We’ve been doing a bit of sorting out, recovering and housekeeping of all the stuff we’ve been putting off while travelling through Africa. Such as taking our nasty bilharzia medication (perhaps diving Lake Malawi wasn’t such a great idea), fixing our broken equipment and replacing lost and damaged items. Part of this meant bidding a sad goodbye to my lovely little linux EEE PC that travelled with me for the past 15 months – it died on me and can’t be resuscitated, according to computer shop experts. But, I’ve replaced it with something that will let us edit footage and images (hooray). So, instead of the one-take-wonders that you’ve had to endure, we’re going to try to learn how to make more interesting little videos. We have so much footage from the past section of the journey that we will be uploading in the next week or so, including gorillas, koalas, gelada baboons, chimps and more. So check back.
And, we’re also planning the next stage of the journey, which will take us from Patagonia to Mexico. Please send any suggestions of interesting projects, people or places I should visit, particularly for the first section: Argentina and Chile.
Posted in Biodiversity, Climate change | Leave a Comment »
Perhaps the “pathetic” response of world leaders to the challenge of Copenhagen was what sowed seeds of doubt in people’s minds about the urgency of the climate threat we face. Scientists, politicians, the media, celebrities all got people keyed up about the importance of Copenhagen, so the damp squib meeting that went nowhere was a bit of an anticlimax to say the least.
Or maybe it’s the inclusion (not in the IPCC’s scientific findings and climate data material, but in a report on impacts of warming) of an erroneous claim that the Himalayan glaciers could entirely melt by 2035, that make people question the broader climate change predictions. Or the humiliating and ongoing public relations disaster for climate scientists at UEA, whose hacked emails reveal a less than professional handling of the (admittedly stressful) position of being besieged by irritating, time-wasting climate deniers while trying to process enormous amounts of important data to a deadline?
Perhaps, being waist deep in the thick soup of a recession makes people less inclined to listen to more doomsday scenarios. Or maybe it’s down to the freakily cold weather in the northern hemisphere that makes people forget that the past decade has been bizarrely warm.
Whatever the reason, there’s a growing presence of climate change scepticism/denial led by a few PR-savvy individuals who’ve seen their opportunity to sway public opinion and grabbed it.
I’m in Sydney at the moment, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who was elected, in part, for his promise (after a decade-long drought in Australia) to act on carbon emissions, is now finding his emissions trading scheme policies unpopular with the electorate. These are policies, mind you, that “strain credulity” in terms of meeting their ambitious targets, requiring “Herculean” efforts, according to Roger Pielke’s assessment.
Still, most people I speak to in Sydney seem to be of the impression that climate change is a giant unproven conspiracy to steal away their money and stop them having fun. It doesn’t help that some of the steps people have taken towards reducing emissions are now in the news for the wrong reasons. A government-backed programme to insulate homes using a foil lining in the roof has caused several electrocutions and fire-related deaths when the foil has been in contact with live wires. The programme has been stopped while homes are checked. And then, for the more wealthy ‘greenies’, there’s the Toyota Prius dodgy accelerator issue.
It’s not just down here that sceptics are gaining ground. A recent BBC poll of 1000 British people found one-quarter of them don’t believe in global warming – a 10% rise since a November poll.
And climate deniers are making subtle inroads elsewhere. This week’s UK Sunday Times – let’s remember that this was the paper that for years insisted that HIV did not cause Aids – carries a headline “World may not be warming, say scientists“. The article is points out that some of the world’s weather stations have seen changes to their local environment, such as construction of buildings nearby, that artificially boost their temperature measurements. This has been accepted and known about for some time. The Sunday times is not revealing anything new here. Our knowledge about the extent of global warming comes from a variety of other sources including satellite data and physical changes such as sea ice melt.
Newspapers need to make money with exciting headlines. But why on earth is the UK’s Energy Institute tomorrow giving sole platform – not even a debate – to a climate sceptic? I thought we’d got past that level of engagement with the issue 5 years ago.
Climate change is a political issue. While developed nations are currently leaning towards climate scepticism, poorer nations are doing the exact opposite, and not necessarily being scientific about it. And that’s my biggest gripe. I have no problem with people having different opinions over what to do about the issue, but the science of global warming – how our carbon emissions bounce heat back to the earth’s surface, and why producing fewer of these molecules will reduce the warming – is not a matter of opinion, it is provable through simple high-school chemistry.
Perhaps this is why, although I have always found IPCC chair (and romantic novelist) Rajendra Pachauri charming during my encounters with him, his political views on climate change do not sit comfortably with his Nobel Prize-winning role as chair of the scientific body whose reports governments are supposed to endorse. His opinion that the nation with soon the world’s largest population should not cap their emissions – for whatever laudable socio-economic reason – do not square with the IPCC’s assessment that humans are causing the planet to warm by polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. Just as there’s no such thing as ‘good Aids’ and ‘bad Aids’, there is no ‘good carbon’ or ‘bad carbon’ – it’s just an element that we need to emit less of.
If there is a reason to smile at all in this depressing return to the dark ages of climate change denial, perhaps it’s in the tickle that even Bin Laden has felt the need to weigh in on the stupidity of Western leaders’ failure to act on the issue.
Posted in Climate change | 5 Comments »
“We’ve found quite a few diamonds on the beach. We don’t look for them, we just stumble upon them. Sometimes one of the kids will bring one up from the bottom when they’re diving for crayfish. But we never take them. I always tell my kids to put it straight back where it came from, because if they catch you … whoa, you’re done for. And they are always around to check, with guns, on boats, cars, even helicopters. They even count how may crayfish you have taken by looking in your fridge and the bin for shells.” Annie is describing Brazil, a beach in the northwestern corner of South Africa, where she sets up camp for 6 weeks every summer with her family. And when South Africans go on a camping trip, it’s not a small affair with a tent and a billy can. Annie will bring everything she ‘needs’, including, most likely, the kitchen sink. We’ve visited campsites that are effectively temporary villages, where everyone has their own toilet, shower, satellite TV, fridge-freezers and enormous generators to power all these essentials.
Every year, the same people go back to the same place, so that many South Africans grow up knowing their campsite neighbours as well or better than their bricks-and-mortar neighbours, and will often continue the tradition with their own children.
Annie, who we meet in the small, Northern Cape town of Springbok (which, incidentally, is the only place in the region that we failed to spot a springbok), goes to Brazil for the fishing and crayfishing. She has to apply for a permit months in advance, because the area is owned by De Beers. So she and her family have to undergo security background checks, credit checks and physical checks before and after reaching the site. Diamond ’stealing’ on the beach is a definite no-no. I find it strange and difficult to understand how this glassy, hard, crystal formation of carbon is so desirable in our culture that people are willing to kill each other for it. You can’t eat it, it’s pretty enough but so are hundreds of other gems, it’s not even particularly rare.
Springbok is set in a rocky hilly landscape at a kind of junction with the Namib and Kalahari deserts. It’s a place of goats and kokerboom (quiver trees), where every telegraph pole carries a bird’s nest and huge rocks lie in piles as though dumped there by a giant road-building scheme. At night, we’re shivering inside our sleeping bags; during the day, it’s stifling.
We journey south towards greening pastures and bountiful vineyards. Through a country that is currently obsessed with Zuma’s Henry VIII-style wife collection and the forthcoming World Cup (and whether or not people are buying tickets). And then, rounding a bend, suddenly there is Table Mountain, like a poster on the windshield.
Cape Town is stunning – naturally beautiful like Sydney with its plunging cliffs and natural bays, its hilly tree-lined streets and gorgeous Victorian architecture. Table Mountain, which is ensconced within a tablecloth of cloud most of the time, towers over the city’s few ambitious high-rises. And, just outside the city, the Cape of Good Hope by Cape Point – not the official southernmost tip of the continent, but nevertheless a potent landmark for explorers and travellers – is a wildlife haven hosting ostriches and baboons, zebras and mongooses, plus sharks, whales and dolphin offshore, where the chilly Atlantic Ocean meets the warm Indian Ocean.
We journey to the Point and then try to seek out Vasco da Gama’s cross. The 15th-century Portuguese was the first to make it all the way from Europe to India by sea, realising that it was possible to sail around Africa’s southern cape. We’ve met up with da Gama in a few places, including Cochin in southern India and so I wanted to visit his cross. Finding it was slightly disappointing – I was expecting a centuries-old Portuguese navigational cross, but found a nice neat Christan marker from the 1940s. It was down to his discovery, I guess, retrospectively, that the Dutch set up their East India Company in the 1650s, leading to a Boer expansion that would colonise the indigenous Bantu and Xhosa peoples.
Around the eastern side of the cape, we have a delicious fish and chip lunch in pretty, historic Simon’s Town, a wealthy area of boutique hotels and chic shops that was reappropriated from the black community in the 1980s. Nearby, the beaches play host to a breeding colony of African penguins, also called jackass penguins for their peculiar braying sound. We spend the afternoon watching them waddle around like smart waiters with their hands in their pockets, and they swim around our feet when we paddle in the sea. Fantastic!
Cape Town feels safe. It’s young and vibrant with art shows and live music, markets and innovative designs, cafes, stores and people. It’s a properly cosmopolitan city with great wine, food from around the world and people of every colour, religion and language. But I only saw white people sitting at tables in the cafes and restaurants of this African city, whereas the servers almost entirely black people. It will take time.
Some things are taking too long, though. Just outside of the beautiful city, we come across the township of Khayelitsa, a slum area where people live in the kind of cardboard and corrugated metal lean-tos that wouldn’t look out of place in Bangladesh or Nairobi. Here, there is an ongoing (for the past decade) toilet issue. Hundreds of households have no toilet facilities. The issue came to a prominent head a few months ago, with the council agreeing to provide either communal toilets or facilities for individual households but without the surrounding walls. The community chose the latter and those who were able to afford it, built enclosing walls around their toilets. Many cannot afford it. There were objections to the council’s plan to give financial aid to the poorest residents on account of this being unfair to those who had already shelled out for their walls. As a result, many people have no toilets at all, many have unprivate privies, and some have community toilets. It means that around the corner from the shiny billionaire’s mansions, people are shitting in buckets in their tiny shacks and emptying them into drains some walking distance away.
The residents are a mixture of recent migrants from elsewhere in the state and continent, and those who were forceably moved there and to the Cape Flats (now a notorious crime area) when their own neighbourhoods were declared ‘whites only’ areas during apartheid. One of these areas was Cape Town’s District Six, a culturally vibrant collection of Victorian terraced housing in the centre of the city. Long-neglected by the city’s council, the housing was overcrowded and sanitation was poor, when the government decided to completely relocate thousands of inhabitants elsewhere and demolish their houses. The community and cultural loss was immense, the injustice at taking a neighbourhood away from its people because they were not white is still deeply felt. On top of this though, the clearance was so artistically shortsighted. These houses, with their original detailed facades, delicate ironwork and careful mouldings would have enriched the city architecturally and supplied irreplaceble residential buildings in the heart of a culturally diverse city. It’s like destroying London’s Soho, New York’s Greenwich Village, Sydney’s Paddington or Glebe.
Posted in Travel | 1 Comment »
Climate change? Bring it on! That’s the message I’ve been hearing from Namibia’s farmers. The rain pattern disturbances that have so devastated East Africa over the past few years have proved an unexpected boon to Namibia’s farmers. This desert state, which in parts gets less than 2 mm of rain over a seven-year-period, is suddenly dealing with emergency evacuations from rising floodwaters in villages in the northeast; and unusually heavy rainfall elsewhere. It is the third year running that the country has received bountiful rains, and it is changing the landscape in a noticeable way. Kilometre after kilometre of grey and mustard desertscape is greening. Goats and cows appear plumper. People here are starting to talk about the possibility of crop planting. This, in a country that imports virtually all of its vegetable matter from South Africa.
Namibia is unusual in Africa in that its economy and its workforce are not heavily dependent on agriculture. Most of the country’s wealth comes from its diamonds and other mined elements, including uranium and platinum. The global economic meltdown has reduced the market greed for diamonds, meaning layoffs in mines across the country. Without other means to make a buck, and with no real substance farming possible because of the harsh climate, we see many very poor, hungry-looking people begging like vagrants in Namibia’s smart, German-styled towns. Youth unemployment is at 60%; the figure for women is almost 80%.
Outside of the towns, though, we see few people working or otherwise. Driving for hundreds of kilometres, we might pass two other cars, let alone humans. There are less than 2 million people living in this vast country.
Our journey takes us towards Sossusvlei and the world’s biggest sand dune – an incredible landscape of sand and shadows that epitomises picture-book Namibia. We camp the night in a town called Solitaire. I say a town, but actually it is just a fuel station, a bakery and a lodge on whose land we camp. Here we meet a German and Swiss who are cycling around Namibia. We quiz these brave/crazy guys on their journey: 135 km per day on average; yes, very sore arses; 10 litres of water on 2 paniers, everything else on another 2; no, just ordinary road bikes that continually slip over in the sand… “We are the guardians of chameleons and tortoises,” Max the Swiss says. “We are always stopping to rescue them from the road and putting them at the side.”
We wish them luck and, with the superior power of a petrol engine, travel far ahead of them into the enormous mountains of sand at Sossusveli, where we stand, tiny as ants in one of the world’s most hostile environments. When it rains here, as it did recently, gardens spring from nowhere, attracting animals that you wouldn’t believe the desert could support otherwise, like elephants and antelopes. We stand and pause a while in Dead Vlei, a garden that long ago dried up, leaving trees that have dehydrated into splinters that cast interesting shadows in the harsh light.
The next day, we drive south into the rainbow nation.
Posted in Climate change, Travel | 3 Comments »
Namibia is most sparsely populated country in the world (after Mongolia), which is perhaps unsurprising since it consists almost entirely of the world’s largest desert, the Namib, after which the country was named. But, on crossing the border from Botswana, where we drove past the Okovango’s ‘pan-handle’ encountering few people, we find the roads in Namibia are bustling with human life. Strings of small, neat villages of mud huts line the road, displaying quirky sculptures made from scrap metal and wood. We pass three- and four-donkey-power carts laden with families and goods. Women and children queue to use water pumps. Cows and goats pause to stop and stare on their slow, poorly chosen journeys across our road. It’s almost like being back in Africa!
Our route into the country is along the Caprivi Strip, a thin corridor of land that was given to the country’s German colonial administrators (in addition to some tiny, strategic North Sea island called Heligoland) by the British in exchange for Zanzibar, and allowed the Germans access (between Angola, Zambia and Botswana) to the Zambezi River. This is one of the world’s youngest countries, gaining independence as recently as 1990. German is still very much in evidence – many people speak it, the signs bear German names and most tourists are from Germany. Afrikaans, the language of the country’s most recent colonialists, is also widely spoken, as is English, so it’s a rare treat to overhear people speaking in any of the ‘clicking’ local tongues. I give a few words a go and have kids screaming with laughter because they deliberately choose ‘naughty’ words for me to practice. For example, the word for ’stone’ is almost exactly the same (to me, identical-sounding) as the word for ‘vagina’.
We drive across the beautiful desert scrub of Etosha national park, spotting a cheetah prowling for its lunch, oryx, giraffe, zebra and more. As with all national parks, I wish I could spend a week there drinking in the sights and sounds, but time marches us on. We overnight near to the entrance gate at a campsite that has its own floodlit watering hole. It’s rainy season here, so the animals have plenty of other venues to choose from and all we spy are some nervous looking deer and a couple of friendly jackels sniffing for scraps. At night, though, the air reverberates with the terrifying sounds of the African bush. At 4am, Nick and I look at each other, wide-eyed in our sleeping bags, both awoken by the bone-chilling sound of lions roaring. We get up and investigate, walking through the black night to the watering hole. There, perfectly reflected in the inky pool, is a male lion, lapping in loud slow tongue slaps, like a cat at a dish of milk.
After a while, he stands, cat-stretches and roars his powerful thunder and then walks out of sight. We stay, waiting for his return. Enormous moon moths flutter against the floodlights, crashing to the ground to be gobbled by jackels (that have somehow made it to our side of the safety fence…).
A several-hundred-kilometre-drive west brings us to the Skeleton Coast and our first sighting of the Atlantic Ocean in more than a year. We pass a fossil forest of pine trees that were transported down here from Central Africa in floods more than 100,000 years ago. The trees are literally petrified – turned to rock so perfectly, it’s as if a fairytale wicked witch flicked her magic wand across a living pine forest. The only conifer that lives here now is the utterly bizarre Welwitschia mirabilis, a dwarf ‘tree’ with just two leaves that can live for several thousand years, producing small pine cones.
The Skeleton Coast, so named because of the whale bones and shipwrecks found there, has seen its fair share of human deaths. Those poor souls landing on its murderous shores mostly perished through lack of water. But oases do exist and the fog that hangs over the sand dunes and gravel plains is the breathe of live for everything that clings to existance here. Sandlopers (bushmen who lived here) have almost entirely vanished, mainly wiped out by diseases introduced by Westerners. Plenty of life is here, though. Lichens colonise the most inhospitable-looking rocks and sands, providing a host for other plants and animals. Desert elephants that can go for up to four days without water roam these dunes, with lions, cheetahs, antelope, ostriches and plenty of reptiles.
It’s a bleak, desolate place, known by the bushman as ‘The land god made in anger’ and the Portuguese as ‘The gates of hell’, but plenty have tried to make their fortunes here. After a chilly night camping amid the wind-whipped sand at Torra Bay, we head south passing disused diamond and agate mines, attempts at oil drilling that were long ago abandoned and shipwrecks. We see the occasional springbok but little else. We see no ostriches, perhaps in part because they were rendered nearly extinct by early prospectors who noticed the birds’ raven-like habit of gobbling up shiny gems, and shot them for their bellyfulls of diamonds.
The desert is far from dead, though, we discover when we accompany the amazing Tommy Collard on a journey through the dunes outside Swakopmund. This enthusiastic, twinkly eyed, bulging calf-muscled guy in his 50s knows the sandscape from spider to oryx and he takes us on one of the best guided journeys of our lives. He races up the impossibly slippery sand dunes as though riding a moving escalator, bounding from one animal track to another to scoop up an iridescent gecko or a beetle with a fused carapace that stands on its head to drink condensed fog droplets from its back.
We find sidewinder snakes with eyes on the top of their heads and a cartwheeling spider that lives beneath a small trapdoor in a complicated web. Chameleons crunch beetles in front of us and a dancing, sand-diving lizard with two bladders (one for water, one for urine) allows us to examine him. From studying this lizard, researchers discovered that animals can munch dead dry plants and internally combust them to produce metabolytes like sugar plus enough water molecules to enable it to survive. But nobody understands how the lizard is able to withdraw water from its bloodstream without the thickened blood clotting. Yet it can.
The desert here is spectacular. Yellow quartz mixing with black magnetite (Fe3O4) that throws a lost seaman’s compass off wack, pink rubylyte and minerals of every other hue. The dunes are constantly moving – large dunes here travel a couple of metres a year; small ones can travel more than a kilometre in a year. This desert originated in central South Africa, travelling here via the Orange River to the ocean where it is bown onto the Namib’s coast in a continual process that is gradually covering the country in sand. Most amazingly, though, Tommy drives us over the sand to a point where the acoustics is so perfect that we can hear the haunting whale song of the dunes calling out around us. It’s an awesome sound, and he jumps out of the LandRover to scoop and pour armfuls of sand from the dune, producing a subtle, quieter version of the magnificent sand mountains’ song.
Swakopmund is a strange German resort town that feels completely unAfrican, a notion that’s enhanced by the relative lack of black people around. We’re very much back in whites own/blacks serve territory, although people here are educated and there is a large, evident middle class peopled by blacks and whites. The Germanness of the town means the streets are very orderly and clean, tapwater is drinkable, recycling points are available for the first time in our African trip, and the beer is good – or so Nick tells me (I’m on the South African wine!). The town makes much of its income from its reputation as an ‘activities destination’. Thus, everything from skydiving to quadbiking is on offer. We try sandboarding. It’s great fun and easier than snowboarding because the sand is lovely and soft (arse-padding not required).
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Unlike almost every other river on Earth, the Okavango river does not encounter any sea or ocean on its 1430 kilometre journey from its source in the hills of central Angola to where it spills into a vast wetlands even further inland in northern Botswana. Around 97% of the Okavango waters evaporate in the delta and are replenished by annual rainfalls in the Angolan uplands and further south in Botswana. The Delta’s wetlands swell to around 28,000 square kilometres – all this in the heart of the bone-dry Kalahari Desert. The floods, which handily occur during the dry season, attract migrating wildlife from far afield, including elephants and zebra from Zambia, Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
(One researcher tells me that elephants in Zambia are evolving shorter, stumpier tusks because those with bigger tusks have been poached, leaving shorter tusked animals to continue the gene line. He is carrying out genetic research on Zambian elephants to prove his theory. But, a wildlife expert I spoke to in Botswana, tells me this is nonsense. He says that the length of an elephant’s tusks depends on the mineral content of the soils it eats. Poor soils mean shorter tusks. I’m inclined to go with this latter theory, even though the first guy has a phd in elephant genetics!)
The delta is beautiful and lush, in part because of the plentiful rains that are also watering our tent. Yes, the cheap tent we bought in Jo’burg has proved to be leaky and all three poles have now broken beyond even Nick’s gaffa tape efforts. Finding a replacement is a tedious task, involving driving around the delta’s biggest town, Maun. It’s an odd place that’s sprung up from a trading post to service the tourist dollar. While Nick attempts to find a midway between a $50 piece of flimsy polyester and a $500 luxury canvas heavyweight, I get chatting to some of the local tribeswomen. I meet Suzanne, a 45-year-old Herero woman, whose family emigrated here from Namibia following German persecution earlier in the 20th century. She wears the typical triangular headscarf of her tribe, which is flat at the front, pirate style, around a rolled-up newspaper. Suzanne makes 5 scarves in one sitting, which will last her a few days – and then she can always have something to read on the loo, I guess. Her sleeved dress, with a bustle and puffed sleeves, is also typical for her tribe – it’s fashioned on the 19th century Victorian dresses that were all the rage when white women first appeared on Namibia’s shores, and looks strange in northern Botswana in the 21st century, but strangely stylish also.
We make do with the scrap of polyester – there’s no in between apparently – and head for our camp on the riverbank. The night begins with the usual frog chorus – more of a rowdy chanting crowd, actually – and our sleep is interrupted with hippo grunts and water splashing on us from the new leaky tent.
In the morning, we head far into the delta on first a speed boat and then a mokoro – a traditional dugout made from the trunk of a sausage tree, or, more commonly nowadays, fibreglass, as the government tries to protect the vanishing trees from destruction. Nick gets stuck into cutting logs and preparing a fire (using elephant dung as a great tinder), while I tease the baboons. Then, our guide, Setsani, takes us bush walking on Chief’s Island. If you want to know how an impala or dikdik feels when walking across open savannah with lions all around, I recommend a bush walk in the Okavango. Luckily, we weren’t dinner and all we saw was a tortoise and a few antelope. We heard plenty of lions though.
Setsani is a fantastic guide – he answers all our wildlife questions with ease, points out the footprints and deduces direction of travel of every animal and can recognise and mimic all their calls. All this and yet he can’t read or write in any of the seven languages he speaks.
Setsani’s uncle was killed by one last year, when he went to fix a problem with the generator at a luxury lodge here. A lion sprung at him. His cousin was killed by a hippo a few months later, when his mekolo accidentally bumped into one in the grasslands.
I gulp at this information during the next day’s mekolo ride. We encounter an elephant taking his bath, who looks lovely, until he begins to charge at us. “Quick, make the boat go faster,” I shout at our poor poler. He tells me, it’s only a teenage elephant showing off – he’s only about 45-years-old, don’t worry, I’m told. Elephants are less dangerous than hippos or crocs, because they give you a warning first, we’re told. The first charge is a scare tactic, the second is a proper warning, and the third – well, you’d best get running. And if an elephant does charge, climbing a tree won’t save you, the elephant will just pull it down. The only way out, we’re told, is to throw your hat down and flee while he/she is engrossed in the hat. I make a mental note to always travel elephant territory with a hat on.
We survive our stay in the beautiful delta – although whether the delta will survive is another question. Climate change is shrinking this vital desert watering hole yearly, with evaporation rates increasing and precipitation decreasing. Countless species of animals depend on this water source – there are 162 arachnid species alone.
We spend one more night on the banks of the river, during which time our campsite is hit by a gang of thieves. Everybody’s tent bar ours is slashed and laptops, money, passports and other valuables stolen. Angolans are blamed, although I don’t know on what basis. We escaped perhaps because I went to bed early and the thieves saw me in there, or because our tent looked too crap, or because they were disturbed. Who knows. Our friends lost their camera with all their holiday snaps, money and their credit cards. We feel lucky.
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The San people, bushman of the Kalahari, are among the world’s most ancient people – they’ve lived in the region for tens of thousands of years. It is to Botswana’s eternal shame that over the past decade, the government here has been systematically removing the bushman from their ancestral lands, destroying their culture and livelihoods in the process, to make way for the diamond mining industry and farmlands. During three major clearouts in 1997, 2002 and 2005, these indigenous people were forced to live in reservations, where the animals they depend on were soon depleted.
Like the Hadzabi people that we met and hunted with on the shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, and the forest tribe we stayed with in Laos, the San – which exist in five tribal groups speaking seven different ‘click’ dialects – are true hunter-gatherers. They hunt game in various ways, including by bow and arrow and by setting innovative corkscrew traps frm underground-dwelling animals like the spring hair, which ensnares the mammal’s fur in its burrow, allowing it to be easily removed. Their most unusual hunting tactic is to outrun an animal, like an antelope, by pursuing it ceaselessly at a pace that just exceeds the animal’s comfort speed. In this way, a group of two or three bushmen can run down a large and fast mammal like a kudu until it collapses from exhaustion in 2.5-3 hours. A television crew from the UK filmed such a hunt here last year and had to reshoot the hunt entirely, because on the first attempt, the film crew in their 4WD vehicle couldn’t keep pace with the hunters on foot! This is in part because the bushmen use shortcuts across the bush to outrun the animal.
The San traditionally live together in small, sustainable, family groups of five-20 members, building temporary grass huts that can be easily dismantled to suit their nomadic lifestyle. Each group will move according to the seasonal availability of game, hunting only what is required to feed their families and supply materials for their clothes and weapons. But, if a family member should die in a certain spot, that place will be abandoned and the group will never again return to camp in that particular place.
Although the groups live and hunt separately from each other, they do come together a few times a year during healing ceremonies led by the Sangoma (medicine men). It is during these meetings that marriages between groups can be arranged. In the north west of Botswana is a place called Tsodilo Hills, a kind of Mecca or pilgrimage site for the San. Thousands of cave and rock paintings there testify to the extraordinarily ancient culture of the bushmen, including artwork depicting seals and whales in a landlocked nation hundreds of kilometres from the ocean. They were painted by San from Angola and Namibia who walked the long journey there.
Like for the nomadic herders we visited around Turkana, the San bushmen’s way of life is under serious threat. But unlike for the Turkana and Samburu tribes, where climate change induced drought is to blame, here in Botswana, the government is orchestrating the San’s decline. Bushmen living in reservations are unable to hunt and so are supplied with government handouts of maize and sugar, which they convert into alcohol to relieve their boredom and depression. Room for maneuvre is limited in a reservation, so people whose entire way of life is built on a roaming relationship with the land and its wildlife are reduced to a fixed-roof existance that’s as alien as asking a suburban Brit to live in a 2-man tent forever.
Alcoholism, HIV and TB rates have soared. There is conflict between the reservation people and locals, because of incidents like, for example, local shops selling things on credit to bushmen, who have never dealt with money transactions before and cannot pay. So they poach or steal goats to make payment.
Some bushmen will never be reservationised – they will hide in the bush and never be found. But the majority are seeing their culture and way of life eroded faster in the past 10 years than in the millennia before. Various concerned NGOs and agencies are trying to help, although some of their efforts seem inappropriate. Survival International, for example, has been handing out LandCruisers to the Bushmen.
In 2006, the Bushmen won the right in the International High Court to return to their ancestral lands. The problem now, though, is that the San have acquired guns, LandCruisers, become accustomed to borehole water supplies and a handy clinic – all provided either by the government or well-meaning NGOs. The bushmen want to return to their hunting grounds in the national parks with all their new comforts including the goats they’ve bought.
The government, rightly in my opinion, has said they are allowed to return, but not with accessories. They are allowed to hunt only with bows and arrows, and must live in their former sustainable way, building grass huts and travelling on foot. Some have returned to their former way of life, but for others, the transition back is just too difficult. Around 50 bushmen have been arrested for hunting in the national parks with guns, for example.
The mess has decimated this ancient peoples – a loss for Botswana and for the world.
“We’re seeing the destruction of a unique way of human life. I’ve lost so many frinds of mine who gave up the will to live once they were moved off their land,” says Martin Flattery, a white Botswanan, who grew up with the Bushmen – he had to have an interpreter when he started school because he only spoke the San click language.
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Terence Bhebhe packs a big round stomach under his bright red singlet and scratches his sprouting hair – he’s a would-be Rasta who dreams of visiting Jamaica but struggles to grow passable dreads and to relinquish his Catholic upbringing. “I love my country. I have a lot of hope. One day, Zimbabwe will be Great again,” he says, referring to an impressive civilization that flourished in the country until the 16th century, leaving remains of a vast stone-built city, known as Great Zimbabwe, that was founded on trade in gold and other precious elements.
Terence, 36, moved hundreds of kilometres north from Harare to Victoria Falls four years ago, another victim of Robert Mugabe’s destructive economic policies, which left the university educated man unable to find paid work outside of this tiny northwestern tourist corner. Now, he struggles to feed his two children and frequently disappears for months at a time to South Africa, Botswana and Namibia for work. But things are looking up, he tells me with a broad grin. “Two years ago, people were starving and desperate, but now, there is hope.”
The country has adopted the US dollar as its currency, which has somewhat stemmed the ridiculous inflation rate that crippled daily life. A loaf of bread would cost ten times as much in the afternoon as the morning. As we drive along, I ask Terence to stop alongside an impressive baobab tree so I can admire it, and a couple of impoverished locals attempt to sell me various items including a Zimbabwean $1 billion note that’s of value only as a curio.
And the racist (against whites) policies introduced by Mugabe have softened considerably. “We’re seeing marriages again between blacks and whites for the first time in a few years,” Terence says. “Everyone loves [Morgan] Tsvangirai. We’re all waiting for Mugabe to die. He’s 87 now, it can’t be long!”
When Mugabe came to power in 1980, in the aftermath of Zimbabwe’s liberation from former British Rhodesia, there were celebrations throughout the nation – he was an exciting breath of fresh air, Terence recalls. Among his first acts was an impressive literacy programme that saw schools spring up across the country to teach children and also enroll adults that had missed out during generations of racist (against blacks) education policy. “Everyone was included – the literacy rate rose to 97% and we matured as a people,” Terence says. “Everyone in the country speaks English.”
But almost immediately, Terence says, there were misgivings. Mugabe announced early on that he wanted Zimbabwe to become a one-party state. It wasn’t until 1990 that the first real opposition party formed, and Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party didn’t come together until 1999, six months before an election that saw it win half the parliamentary seats.
Terence is a founding member of the MDC, and currently party Secretary for the region. “The main basis for forming the party was the issue of racism,” he explains. “I was studying for my undergraduate degree [in molecular biology] at the University of Harare, and a few of us like-minded students would get together and talk for hours about politics. It was clear that Mugabe was a racist, and we blacks, who had suffered under the segregation policies before, did not want the same to be done to white people – to our white friends. It was unjust and backward.”
The MDC grew out of these university discussions to the extent that Tsvangirai is the ‘power-sharing’ president-in-waiting. “We are working on a new constitution, right now, which should be completed by February or March. It will be a non-racist constitution with firmly written rules spelling out how long a president’s term can be,” Terence says with a grin. “We’re aiming for the beginning of 2011 for the next election.”
Zimbabwe, a nation of 12.5 million people – although 4m are currently living in South Africa, pending a return to democracy – is made up of 14 tribes speaking 17 languages, and yet it is a remarkably peaceful country despite severe provocations. One of Mugabe’s nastiest tricks was creating a racist culture where none existed. Liberation from the British took a joint campaign in different districts by the two largest tribal groups, the Shona and Ndebele. On taking the throne, Mugabe, who is from the Shona group, and his generals instigated a hate campaign against the Ndebele’s, probably from fear of power-sharing, which in 1982 saw thousands of Ndebele ‘rebels’ slaughtered and imprisoned. Terence, who is Ndebele, says this was a top-down hate campaign and he has never in his life suffered any racism from Shonas – “they are my friends and the people I sat next to in school. Hate in Zimbabwe,” he explains, “is not about hating people, it’s about hating policies.”
Mugabe’s success has been secured by the country’s extraordinary riches. The Great Dyke, a granite formation, stretches from the east to central Zimbabwe, and is rich in 9 minerals: gold, platinum, radium, uranium, asbestos, tin, diamonds, emeralds and manganese. “The gold we have could be mined for the next 1000 years without running out,” Terence says. Mbeki is a top shareholder in the country’s platinum mining company, which is a large part of the reason for South Africa’s ’softly, softly’ diplomatic approach towards Mugabe’s atrocities. But the way that Africa’s leaders have effectively condoned Mugabe’s destruction of the country and its people says a lot, I think, about the extent of corruption and inequalities across this sorry continent. And says a lot about this perception that the leader of a country in Africa is not the servant of his (it’s always a man) people, but rather their master.
We visit the magnificent ‘Mosi oa Tunya’ (Smoke that Thunders), or Victoria Falls, as the dutifully patriotic David Livingstone named them, when he – as a plaque by the Falls records – “discovered” them in the 1850s. This, one of the seven wonders of the world, is breathtakingly beautiful. A powerful surge of water that tips 2 kilometres of Zambezi River down 100 metres of granite, sending spray visible for 10 kilometres or more. We are immediately drenched as we walk along the Zim side (the Zambian side – Livingstone’s approach – is mostly river) and we reach the 1904, British-built bridge after a couple of hours. It is crowned with rainbows.
A pool of water that is apparently safe to swim in, is midway long the river at the edge of the falls on the Zambian side, but we don’t cross the border. Anyway, two people died there last month, slipping from the pool to their flying deaths. Bizarrely, the Vic Falls is something of a destination for suicidal tourists. One man recently flew in from New Zealand, specifically to jump to his death. As I walk the rocky edge, marvelling at the power of so many innocuous drops of H2O, a national parks guide rushes over and grips onto my wrist (annoyingly), fearful I may fall. Many people slip on these wet rocks, and it’s a one-way fall.
We make it safely back to the dry lands and return across the border into Botswana.
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We buy a tent, sleeping bags and rent a car in Jo’burg, sharing the cost, the driving and the journey with a couple from Ireland and New Zealand on their holidays here. We head north, churning hundreds of kilometres along the route travelled by so many of our illustrious European forbears, including Speke and Livingstone, and so many of our not so illustrious forbears who were less intent on exploration so much as exploitation.
We skirt west into Botswana, finding a wonderfully organised country with a very low crime rate, good clean roads, quality housing, and friendly, well-educated people. Our road north from Francistown – Botswana’s second city but to us, more like a small country town – is, like most roads in this sparsely populated country, surrounded by African bushland. It’s not long before we have to stop to avoid hitting a crossing elephant. Unlike with other road fauna like goats or monkeys or deer, elephants aren’t the kind of obstacles you hurry along by tooting your horn. Elephants interrupting our journey are very much free to take their sweet time crossing in front of us – I’m certainly not hurrying a 5 tonne beast with huge tusks and a stream of musk running down from each eye.
Wow, Botswana is fantastic. Most of the country is Kalahari desert (84%) and the rest is a riverine system of wetlands thriving with wildlife. Our journey to Kasana in the northeast corner of the country is better than a game drive through a national park anywhere else. We see antelope, elephants, baboons, giraffe and more just from the highway. We set up camp in grounds bubbling up with deafening frogs on the bank of the Chobe River, a few hundred metres from its confluence with the mighty Zambezi (Africa’s fourth biggest river after the Nile, Niger and Congo). Across the river is Namibia, but we aren’t crossing yet. After a troubled night, nervously staring into the whites of each others’ eyes in the dark, while enormous-sounding elephants trumpet nearby and hippos munch and fart scarily close to our flimsy nylon tent, we organise a boat trip down the river.
Apart from a massive boat taking the visiting Indian prime minister, his press and armed entourage, we are the only boat on a vast expanse of river that’s boiling with hippos and crocs, whose heads appear disturbingly near us as we cruise by. “I’ve lost a couple of tourists in the past few months,” says Elliot, our boatman/guide. “One fell in the water drunk and got eaten by crocodiles. The other was on a fishing trip and got dragged in by the line.” I gulp and move back a bit from the helm. Just one of these hippos can overturn our boat, should it choose, Elliot says.
We spy fish eagles and kingfishers, antelope and deer, hippos and giraffes. We stop to watch an elderly male elephant pee, poo and then cross the river from an island (with a Botswanan flag defiantly waving in Namibia’s face) to the other bank. Then we come across a broad, shallow bank where around a hundred elephants have gathered to play, wash, swim and bully each other. It’s a magical sight and we stay a while enjoying the scene. A tiny baby elephant, no bigger than a dog, trots down the bank towards the river and is knocked over by a clumsy adult male dashing past. Immediately, a group of 10 concerned elephants rush over and encircle the baby, protecting him from further injury and stroking him with their trunks. Meanwhile, a couple of teenagers run around tormenting birds, chasing them till they fly off and then rushing after them and trumpeting when they settle again. It’s great fun and we’re all sorry when they leave en masse and head back into the bush.
Botswana is Africa’s success story. A fully functioning non-racial democracy since independence in the 1960s, which benefits from a tiny population of less than 2 million over an area the size of France or Texas, Botswana funds its impressive social security system with its rich natural resources, including platinum, diamonds and gold. Everyone here is educated – schooling is free. The streets are clean, there is no corruption, housing is provided for the poor and frontpage news in the national broadsheet is about the scandal of a woman who has been living in a converted bus and has been overlooked by social services. Where else in Africa?
But I fear for this shining beacon of a country. Two years ago (at the end of 2007), President Festus Mogae retired, handing over to his deputy Lt. Gen. Ian Khama. Yup, you spotted it, a military man. As are his deputy and most of the top members of his cabinet. Khama acquired his position on the basis of his father, Seretse being the first president of the liberated country in 1966. On election, two years ago, Ian’s first move was to clamp down on press freedom, issuing a rule that all reports have to pass through his office first. Other limitations on democracy have followed. It’s not looking good for this nation, which has such a small population that rebelling against a military-led authority would be near impossible.
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