Category: Botswana

Ice Cap Covers Botswana

Ice Cap Covers Botswana

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

April 26, 2011, southwest Okavango Delta. These are supposed to be dry roads.
The ice cap is moving onto Botswana and the Kalahari Desert. No, this is not a Fox News report.

I just returned after nearly two months (on separate trips) into Botswana, and I’ve watched with trepidation albeit excitement a natural event which has not been recorded before. The Okavango Delta, one of Botswana’s most important tourist attractions and one of the most unique ecosystems on earth, is going bananas.

It isn’t a surprise. This is the third year running that the Delta has reached dangerous levels but the latest predictions made in mid-April suggest this year will be the worst ever and that it will continue to get worse and worse in the years to come.

This is extremely dangerous mostly to the fragile human populations eking an existence on the trail of water leading back to the Angolan Highlands, where it all originates.

But dangerous as well to the serious investments many have made in Botswana’s tourism industry.

And dangerous or at the least very disrupting to tourists. My account on this is first-person.

First, some necessary background:

The Okavango Delta is essentially the Kalahari Desert flooded. Excuse the non sequiturs, but it’s not my fault, it’s the vernacular that called central Botswana a desert. The Kalahari isn’t really a desert. It gets more rain per year than much of America’s southwest. It’s a Mojave plains, or high sierra butte that doesn’t get a lot of rain, but lots more than a desert.

But unlike the Mohave or high sierra, its ground base is grey-white powdery sand, the result of millennia of flatness and repeated rapid evaporation in a severe climate where summer temperatures can exceed 110F and winter temperatures can sink below freezing.

This has led to an extraordinary unique ecosystem, with plants fantastically adapted to grabbing and conserving the rain that does fall.

And every year unbelievable amounts of water spill into its upper regions. And as global warming melts the ice caps, there’s more and more water. Where the water spills onto the Kalahari is the Okavango Delta.

The Delta doesn’t dry up when the surge of water coming out of the Angolan Highlands ebbs as it does every year with the end of the Angolan Rains. The effect of millennia has been cumulative. At all times of the year there is a marshy, swampy, river run Delta. It has grown or receded over the centuries but it always bloats the first half of the year and shrinks back a little the second half of the year.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) issued the latest comprehensive scientific report several months ago, and the more recent and detailed graph below is now in circulation.

This year will exceed the highest ever flow of water into the Delta.
All indications point to worse years in the future.

The bottom line is that many of the camps, campsites and tourist lodges in the Delta may be in peril this year.

In early March I visited the northeast Delta. The airstrip at Kwara camp was flooded. The managers made the mistake of trying to keep the camp open by transporting passengers 2½ hours from the next nearest workable airstrip.

But the tracks from that airstrip to the camp were also flooded. The vehicles flooded out. In one incident, water was above the floorboard as we stared a small crocodile in the eye.

The edge of my cabin in the Delta. Note the gardening hose normally used to water the grass is under water.

A month later I visit Jao Camp in the southwest Delta. Twenty-four hour pumps and a three-foot high ring of sand bags around its airstrip barely kept it functional. I watched a Cessna 208 slip as it landed. The water lapped at my cabin deck and game drives were as if in partially submersible military vehicles.

Both these camps are operated by very good companies, and their experience is shared by virtually every camp in the Delta. It’s critically important these two camps not be singled out from the other 53 in the Delta that all face the same problem.

True “water camps” as Delta camps are locally known, are understandably positioned to experience the unique delta floods. It’s just that no one expected the ice cap to melt this quickly.

This is quite serious. Two of the three “pushes” or surges of flood waters that occur each year are over, but the third is yet to come. So even as the rainy season ends in southern Africa (usually right about now), the flooding of the Delta will continue. Last year waters did not begin receding until August.

I have great sympathy for Delta camp owners and investors. Kwara, in fact, has rebuilt both the airstrip and camp to higher ground.

But will it be high enough?

On Safari: Is The Delta Floating Away?

On Safari: Is The Delta Floating Away?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Climate change is effecting Africa seriously, and perhaps nowhere is it as evident as in the Okavango Delta.

The delta is Botswana’s landmark attraction. It’s where the Kalahari ecosystem floods. That’s right, a “desert” in flood.

The unusual continental divide in Africa is very close to its western coast. And the torrential rains of Angola flow regularly east creating some of Africa’s great rivers like the Zambezi, and some of its most famous natural wonders, like Victoria Falls.

And the Okavango Delta, for here the water spills onto a flat scrubland, creating ever-changing islands and massive marshes and wetlands. And the rich nutrients deposited create a fertile ecosystem with as diverse a biomass as found anywhere in Africa.

But the Delta is being stressed by global warming. More water than ever imagined is flowing into it. And this year it’s a double whammy as unusually heavy rains pour relentlessly onto the delta as well.

Our camp’s airstrip was flooded out. The circuitous tracks we had to take from the nearest surviving airstrip challenged our Landcruisers as they submerged well above their floorboards and bubbled through flooded areas like tugboats!

High water time in the Delta is May and June. Yet already in March the water was higher than it had ever been before.

What does this mean? For one, there have been many resident animals like elephant, giraffe, buffalo and sassaby that may be pushed out. For another, reeded wetlands supporting many bird rookeries may be pushed far away towards the radical climates of the pans.

And for populated areas like the important central city of Maun, humans are being relocated away from the rising tide.

The wilderness is resilient. I have little doubt that for many years of stress during our global climate change, plants, animals and birds will adapt. But man’s permanent settlements, including existing camps and lodges much less cities and villages, will be much more traumatically challenged.

On Safari: Wells to Protect Game?

On Safari: Wells to Protect Game?

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

For a very long time throughout southern Africa wilderness areas have been supported by manmade wells to provide year-round sources of water for the game. It’s absolutely necessary.

And so different from East Africa, for example, where this level of intervention in the wild hasn’t yet occurred.

I visited Nxai Pan national park in Botswana, which is very similar to the nearby and probably better known Makgadikgadi Pan to its south. Together they represent the largest salt pans in the world, ancient lakes that if connected would have been among the largest fresh water lakes in the world.

Although technically salt pans are incapable of any vegetative growth, there are vast grassland and scrubland areas on the periphery which bloom in this rainy season.

And today, thanks largely to the manmade water wells drilled in these peripheral areas, considerable game can reside year-round. True, the vast majority appear during the rainy season (November – March) but the “borehole” ecology is creating a year-round big game ecosystem.

I was there as the rains ended in March, together with hundreds of zebras which only a few short weeks before were thousands of zebra. There were also lots of wildebeest, elephant, and the springbok and oryx are resident year-round.

By the park’s principal water hole reside the park’s only lion pride. They don’t have much work during the dry season, because the animals in the area during the dry season will have to come to drink at some point. So the lions just hang out around the water hole.

At this time of the year there’s a bit more of a challenge, and we found the pride of 8 lion wandering some distance away into a dense forest, stalking impala. Shortly thereafter, we saw a magnificent male leopard strung (it seemed quite uncomfortably) atop the stick branches of a dead tree in the middle of that forest. Clearly, he had been chased up there by the lion.

The true Nxai pan is an amazing salt flat with raised islands of vegetation. Nxai’s most famous is “Baine’s Baobabs”, a little forest of 8 remarkably sculpted baobabs in an area that couldn’t be more than a half-acre large. It creates one of the most scenic landscapes in Africa that I’ve ever seen.

When boreholes for game reserves were first contemplated in the early part of the last century, there was some considerable debate about whether it was appropriate. The debate no longer exists.

I suppose as an East Africaphile I have an innate aversion to this, and many other similar management techniques employed in the south. Such as carrying capacity land management and culling.

But in the end, is it any different than the bird seed in my feeders at home, or the heated bird bath on my deck in the winter?

On Safari in the Kalahari

On Safari in the Kalahari

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tourism has come to the Kalahari Desert, but not everyone wants it to, not least some of the Bushmen who live there.

I spent two days in the Central Kalahari Reserve at a beautiful 8-bed lodge called Tau Pan Camp, experiencing this huge natural wonder as a dream come true. I was not disappointed.

The Kalahari Desert is vastly misunderstood, for it is hardly an expanse of sand, nothing like the Sahara or the desolate sands of the Namib just to its west. The reserve itself is just over 20,000 sq. miles, although this is probably only two-thirds of the entire ecological area.

This huge area – about twice the size of Massachusetts – is a magical scrubveld, similar to much of Arizona and New Mexico. Beautiful succulents, innumerable wild flowers, characteristic water-saving tubers and even acacia and baobab trees pepper a certainly very flat landscape.

It is particularly beautiful now, as the intense summer rains begin to end. And the many varieties of grasses draw large amounts of game like oryx, springbok, sassaby and red hartebeest.

And these beautiful, colorful creatures tend to linger at the Kalahari’s many pans, like Tau by which I stayed. These are sometimes massive, sometimes small depression remnants of ancient lakes, which today fill only briefly and then with very shallow pools of water. Some through eons of evaporation become actual salt pans. Others, like Tau, become immense fields of nutrient grasses with the rains that begin in November and last through March.

And not just animals, but remarkable birds are found here. The rains allow the birds to bloom as much as the grasses! I was mesmerized by the many strikingly colorful black khorans displaying, their bright red faces calling love tunes to any nearby lady, quite oblivious to our interest!

But the Kalahari’s marvelous ecology is an on-off one regarding water. Come the end of April, there is often nothing but dust until the new rains in November. But this magical places stores much of the rainy season underground, and occasionally (and more so with help from boreholes) the water is available year-round to the resident Kalahari lions and other predators.

And therein lies the controversy. The Botswana government is waging battle against some of the San (Bushman, click-speaking) people to force them from their traditional lifestyles into community based tourism projects. Part of this battle is the drilling of boreholes to establish permanent colonies of wild animals.

One early morning I was taken by one San, who in English vernacular chose the name “Custom”, into the bush not far from the lodge. There he demonstrated some truly remarkable skills of the desert nomad, including how to snare small game like steenbok, how to extract medicines and poisons from the vegetable bounty that surrounded us, how to start a fire and how to extract pure water from the large turnip-like tuber base of a flimsy little succulent.

Custom, being a part of the tourism industry already, had no qualms about the government’s moves. But as for his relatives? He was equivocal.

There are only two places currently in this massive area for tourists. I stayed at the stunningly beautiful Tan Pan Camp. My life has been in tourism, and I feel when done properly, it contributes as much to the well-being of current peoples as to the preservation of traditional cultures.

What none of us want to see is a degeneration of traditional cultures into the refrigerated housing of current American Indians. Let’s hope the Botswana government and San peoples will find the right way.