Day 6. Thu 22nd April
Dqãe Qare.
We get up at six to repack the Land Rover, as Ken is concerned that the
heavy rain showers may have got into the dried food. However, everything
is OK, although there is unaccountably a large amount of water in the cool
box.
Amanda provides an excellent breakfast of muesli, yoghurt and delicious
spicy cakes, and we head off at about 7:30 for Maun - we are entering Mark
and Delia Owens' country.
Sunshine spots two big bull elephants and we stop to photograph them.
They are too far away for the Fuji, so I dig out the diginocs. Remarkably
these have stayed together quite well, although they eat batteries, and
changing them involves taking all the sellotape off and then sellotaping
them up again tightly. Nevertheless they do seem to work, although the
controls are not exactly intuitive. They have no view screen, so I won't
know if I've got anything worth keeping until I get to a computer*.
We stop off in Nata to buy water, food, bread, pink sausage and fruit,
and then find a shady tree, without too much litter, for lunch. The bread
rolls that Julie bought turn out to be filled with cream, but this is only
discovered after she has put sausage in two of them and given them to Pete
and Ken!
In Mark and Delia's time Maun (pronounced Ma-oon) was little more than
the Riley's Hotel. Now it is a thriving town, but with little of interest
to us, so we fill up with diesel and drive on. This is the closest we will
come to the inland delta of the Okavango. Although one of the most famous
places in this part of Africa, Ken has not put it on the intinerary, he
feels it is too touristy for hardened adventurers like us.
Tonight we stay at the Dqãe
Qare Bushman Game Farm, which is half way between Dekar and Ghanzi.
(Dqãe Qare translates as "Steenbok biltong"). We first drive the
extra 30KM to Ghanzi to finish stocking up for our stay in the Kalahari
Game Reserve. We will need food and water (and beer) for six days. Ken
buys huge slabs of meat and sausage from the local family butcher, and
the Land Rover is bursting at the seams. As well as enough bottled drinking
water for us all we have two twenty-litre containers of water for cooking
and washing, and two big tanks of diesel. We are now saving our water bottles
and filling them with tap water, removing the labels to distinguish them
from the drinking water.
The bushman lodge is several kilometres off the road into the game
farm. Our arrival is greeted by three ostriches, two female and one male.
The male displays proudly in front of one of the females, but she is only
interested in us and our vehicles and comes right up to have a look. (Note,
the safest place around an ostrich is behind, they can disembowel you with
a kick, but they can only kick forwards.)
Ken, Julie and I take a walk into the bush for sundowners while Pete and
Kathy have a knicker wash. The sunset is magnificent, and the moon is about
two days away from eating Venus.
There is no restaurant here, we eat out own food, but the farm staff cook
it for us, under Ken's watchful eye.
We are all pretty tired after another long day's driving, especially
Ken after his night in a saggy bed in an unventilated (and unmosquitonetted)
grass hut. Unfortunately this time he is unable to negotiate a room to
himself, so he and I must share, and I have a bad night and keep him awake
all night snoring.
(* The elephant photos weren't any good, but I did get
one or two decent ones, see the index
of photographs).