Where Are Ron and Ellen?
Portugal (Ron and Ellen), Southeastern Africa (Ron), 19 September 2013 - 13 January 2014
Ron and Ellen in Porto, Portugal, October 2013
Chobe National Park in Kasane, Botswana, and Victoria Falls in Livingston, Zambia
26 December 2013
Afton, Virginia, USADear family and friends,
While Ron has been riding buses between various points in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Botswana (granted, he also did a couple more safaris and went to Victoria Falls, but it seems to me there is an awful lot of bus riding!) I have been having a fine holiday season at home with friends and family. On Friday 20 December I went to the 30th annual North Branch School production of St. George and the Dragon. St. George includes poems, stories, songs and dances in celebration of the Winter Solstice. Many elements of the production are from mummer's plays and Christmas Revels. All students participate (except nursery), so by the time they reach 8th grade they have learned and played many increasingly complex roles, songs, and musical pieces. This year Leo is in 8th grade (so it was his 9th and last St. George) and Simon is in 6th.
Christmas Eve I spent with our daughter, son-in-law, grandsons, and granddog, and Christmas evening had dinner with long-time friends. The weather is cold, but happily we didn't get the bad ice storm that hit much of the northern and eastern US. Our geothermal heat is working beautifully - I am blessed!
To see St. George photos, click on the thumbnail at the left.
Love to all,
Ellen
Chobe National Park in Kasane, Botswana, and Victoria Falls in Livingston, Zambia
26 December 2013
Mbeya, TanzaniaHello, my dear,
From the feedback I know a few people read these messages, but I suspect they might be more useful for people planning a backpacker trip to Africa who find these reports from their searches on the Internet, like I did before making this trip. Much of this you have gotten in the many little notes I send along the way to stay in touch. Perhaps I write more for me to read about my experiences later when my memory fails to recall the details of my experiences on this trip.
The almost a week between Blantyre, Malawi and Kasane, in northeast Botswana, has been a travel time, waiting for buses, to Lilongwe, finding places to sleep, a night in Lusaka with a group of Japanese at a hostel, a night in Jolly Boy's Hostel in Livingston, Zambia, meeting other travelers, changing money, crossing borders and building up a lot of dirty clothes that need washing.
Kasane, Botswana, will be the most western point of this trip. Eddie's story made me want to see Chobe National Park and the French movie maker I met gave me some good logistical notes.
It was a little more difficult to get to Kasane from Livingston since the normal buses leave only in the early morning - before I had even gotten up and decided I was going to go to Botswana. But a guy showed me I could walk out of town to where the shared taxis leave when they get four people to take to the border. The border was easy and Botswana didn't require a visa for a short stay to go to the park. I also learned that it is not easy to jump on a raising ferry ramp moving away while wearing a backpack, a shoulder bag and carrying a bag of water bottles and food. There were lots of laughs.
There was a small van bus that took me to Kasane where I started looking for a cheap place to stay. I arrived believing I could find cheap places. Ha. The cheapest I could find was $70+ (full) and $100+ for available rooms. After wandering around for a while and asking people for information, I rented a room from a guy in town who had a small room in an outside building behind his or his parent's house for $18. It was fine, had a TV, icebox, fan, an electric plug for charging my equipment, clean, with the toilet and shower in the main house, and before I moved in he had a lock installed on the door.
Then I caught a shared taxi for a half dollar down the road a couple of km to Thebe Safari Camp, a large hotel and camping resort with rooms for $110+ and camping sites for $10-12. I signed up for two of their safaris, one on the river and one by safari buggy, both shared with others. One was in the morning and one in the afternoon for the discounted combined price of around $60 (500BP).
The buggy safari sped deep in the park before taking the smaller roads and going slower to observe the animals. The river boat safari (which they called the Sunset Safari but ended before the sun really set) did not go way up the river where I had wanted to go but gave me a good experience of what the river is like. In the dry season (Feb) there would be thousands of large animals gathered on the shores and the islands between Botswana and Namibia but the rains had already started and the land was green with lots of food and water for the animals so they had migrated away from the river and even further than the buggy took us. I still saw elephants, hippopotamus, giraffes, crocodiles, wild dogs, water buffalo, water bucks, baboons, a lion pride, a swarm of mongoose, an overwhelming number of antelopes (glad there were not in our garden) as well as a large number of very different birds which Allen would have loved. Because the rains have started the park is very green with lots of flowers starting to bloom.
Coming here has helped me realize how lucky I was to have gone to Selous Game Park, which I called a Peak Experience. Here there are more vehicles coming to wherever the excitement is found, such as the sleeping lion pride. There must have been six or more vehicles watching the pride which I could barely see in the distance. Except for the number of antelopes and buzzards, I saw all of the same animals but up closer in Selous. Back in the 1970s there was a problem with tsetse fly in Chobe and they sprayed some kind of chemical which killed the trees and there are lots of large dead trees. The vegetation and terrain was not as diverse and beautiful to me as was Selous. However there was a different beauty to the long and wide open views of the river in Chobe.
Perhaps if I had come in the dry season and taken a safari far up the river where I spent the night in a camp on the lake I wanted to visit, it would have been more like the Selous experience.
Botswana seems to have figured out how to accommodate both the rich tourists and the backpackers. The Japanese I met in Lusaka told me they bought their small tents in Kenya and Tanzania for low prices and used them at hostels where camp sites were really cheap and they could use common kitchens, toilets and showers. Thebe Safari Camp had some very nice facilities for campers including a bar, restaurant, kitchens, and lots of clean toilets and hot showers. The non-campers had some nice rooms in a large courtyard.
If one paid in Dollars instead of local currency, everything would be much more expensive because they use an exchange rate of 7BP/$1 while the official rate is 8.7BP/$1. There is a small center with a Spar Grocery Store, KFC, and an ATM.
From Botswana I start my long trek to Zanzibar Island for a week including New Years with my Japanese friends I met earlier. From Kasane I caught a shared taxi to the border for $0.50 and crossed the border with my double entry Zambia visa and caught a shared taxi for $5 back to Livingston.
And I am beginning to have an appreciation for what the "rainy season" really means. In Lilongwe, Lusaka, Livingston and Kasane it had rained a lot of the night but it has now also started raining in the day. Just a little in Kasane, but when I returned back to Livingston and had washed all my dirty clothes I was caught out in the afternoon, with no shelter nearby in a storm with the biggest raindrops I have ever experienced and I got drenched. Now all my laundry was wet as well as the shoes and clothes I was wearing! Now I have broken out my waterproof foot booties that go over my socks (when dry) so I can wear my only pair of (now wet) shoes. With the help of a fan I managed to get my clothes dry. Now every day I also carry my heavy rain coat as well as the very light jacket.
Of course the main reason I went to Livingston was to visit Victoria Falls, and it was worth the effort. Amazing breadth of the falls extending into Zambia and Zimbabwe. And while the rains had started, this was still considered the dry season so the water flow was way down. But I could imagine what it would be like in the really rainy season when all the streams falling over the edge would be combined and connected to form a wall of water. A 28ish backpacker from Vancouver of Chinese descent and I explored the park and walked down to the boiling point, crossed the viewing bridge in Zambia, explored the other walking trails and while she took the swimming tour to a point just above the falls I walked across the bridge between the Zambia and Zimbabwe borders where people bungee jump. Now I can say I have been to Zimbabwe and have the pictures of the signs saying entering Zambia and entering Zimbabwe to prove it. I bought some more of those million and trillion dollar Zimbabwe bills from the guys selling them to tourists.
There are a lot of outdoor sporting activities for the younger people here including rafting, hiking, bungee jumping, scuba diving, bicycling, and a helicopter ride over the falls, but I was content to walk and explore and valued the experience.
At the Jolly Boys Hostel I did have a new experience. I was assigned a bunk in a dorm room and went to bed late without disturbing my roommates. In the morning I discovered one was a young lady from Roanoke. Mixed sex dorms was a new experience. When I returned from Kasane one day earlier than my reservation was for Jolly Boys, they didn't have a room so I had to go to a different hostel for the night and my dorm mate was a native businessman from Zambia who's father, deceased, was one of the most famous African writers. We had some interesting conversations and I tried to get him to set up a Web site and self publish his father's books. He promised to send me one. We shall see.
Making the choices about transportation and travel dates to get to Zanzibar has not been easy. No good choices. To take the train I would have to catch a bus to Lusaka (9 hours) and then, after spending the night, catch another bus to where the train starts (3 hours) - and the train might take up to 48 hours (more or less) and I would have to take the first bus on Christmas Eve and the second on Christmas day. But then I learned that buses are much faster than the train and figured out how to split up the bus rides. So I took an overnight bus (18 hours) on Christmas Eve from Lusaka to spend Christmas day in Mbeya, a town I already knew, and will spend two to three nights. Today I will get a ticket for Dar es Salaam, an overnight if possible so I won't have to spend the night between arrival and catching the ferry to Zanzibar. In the next report you will find out how this works out.
Love and miss you. And I hope that you and those who read this had a Merry Christmas with those they love - like I hope to do next Christmas.
Ron
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Last updated: 10 January 2014
