Saturday, 19 July 2014

Day 2 - Ghanzi, Lake Ngami, Botswana



Ernest's instructions when we went to bed last night was that we all needed to get up at 6.30 to be packed and off by 7.30. Well that didn't work too well as it was still pitch black at 6 .30 and I for one wasn't going to stick my nose out of that tent for fear of getting frost bite and my poor nose falling off. I think most of the others felt the same so everyone eventually started creeping out at 6.45 to 7.  Still freezing! Anyway it was a quick breakfast with a choice of muesli, muesli, or muesli so everyone chose the muesli and I didn't have to cook.

Packing up was a case of lots of fingers and thumbs but I must say I was impressed with the speed with which everyone got going. Ken and Rouvierre were the two fastest off the mark and left the rest of us standing in their dust. I think Ken was determined to show Ernest he has met his match.

The town of Jwaneng we learnt is a mining town... Diamonds of course and is totally controlled by DeBeers. I couldn't figure out why there was a rather nice golf club in town, an unusual thing to find in Botswana, more like the old colonial times in Zimbabwe. From the campsite we could see the huge mine dumps, looking just like the mine dumps around Krugersdorp and Joburg.

The days travel was fairly uneventful; it is a pretty straight road, well maintained. No SA potholes
 that you have to dodge or break a wheel off. The only thing you have to be wary of is the odd donkey, cow or goat that runs across the road. One other interesting things is that the grass on the side of the road has been cut for miles on end for about two to three hundred kilometers, we just couldn't work out why they would cut these huge verges until my bright spark of a husband realized that is obviously a fire break and so the mystery was solved.

There is just endless bush up here and a big fire would be totally devastating with no way to stop it other than the road. When the grass was cut it showed just how many Kalahari melons grow in the bush, just mile after mile of a literal carpet of melons. During our lunch break Kim and Ernest got into a game of putting the Spiky melons onto each others seats in the hope that someone would sit on the dam thing. Ernest is missing playing tricks on his grandsons so Kim is now the target.

We traveled up to Ghazi which has an interesting history. During Rhodes time he settled a lot of British farmers in this area to stop the Germans from spreading further into Africa from South West Africa, just as he also formed an alliance with the Barotse king in the western side of Zambia to stop the Portuguese from spreading into Africa from Angola. Rhodes had a dream about colonize the whole of Africa for the British Empire.

When we arrived at Ghanzi we sent Ken off to try and find out if there were any camp sites close to Lake Ngami which was our target stop for the night. They very smartly found the tourism info center who told us there was an old abandoned campsite so off we went ...Ernest was smiling as he had a place at the end of the journey. We arrived at Lake Ngami, found the abandon camp site but there was now a local bar established on the site. After a bit of debating we decided that the bar was better than nowhere so we set up camp and prepared ourselves for a noisy night. I think they took one look at us and decided to abandon the bar and take their party elsewhere. Shew we all sighed with relief.

We had a wonderful peaceful night sitting around the camp fire telling stories and sharing the peace and wholeness of Africa.

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