Delta force: Searching for lions on African safari
SAFARI | An oasis in the desert, Botswana's Okavango ranks as one of the world's last great wilderness areas
KAVANGO DELTA, Botswana -- At last.
There she was.
(Dana Allen)
The series is based on Alexander McCall Smith's best-selling books about private investigator Precious Ramotswe, the intuitive, no-nonsense proprietor of the only female-owned detective agency in Botswana.
The two-hour pilot, directed by the late Anthony Minghella, premiers March 29 on HBO. Six additional weekly episodes will follow on Sunday nights.
Played by Grammy Award-winning singer Jill Scott, Ramotswe is a composite of several women McCall Smith has met in Botswana, where the series was filmed.
Meanwhile, Ramotswe is busy solving another ordinary crime in an extraordinary way in McCall Smith's 10th book in the series. It's titled Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (Pantheon, $23.95) and is due out next month.
Michael Cooke
With sand-blond hair, red-blood lips, a flash of teeth and a hint of tongue.
She's a wild one all right.
It had been a long wait.
Some men might not have hung around.
I did though.
Was she worth it?
Oh yes.
uuu
Let's back up a bit. We were in the Okavango Delta with the lioness that it took two days to find.
She was looking very pleased with herself and ignoring our Land Rover. Her dead buffalo lay sliced open and steaming nearby.
"Do something for your soul," a pal had told me. "See things you've never seen before. Reach out. See some great nature before the nature all disappears. Get away."
So I got as far away as getting away gets, the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana. The world's largest inland delta, they call this massive sprawl of African wetlands the last untouched wilderness in the world.
It's a paradise of travel cliches: hot, lush and teeming with wildlife, especially what are known as the Big Five: buffalos, leopards, elephants, lions and rhinos, which I thought were just about extinct, but no, they've made an astonishing comeback.
If that's not enough, there are cheetahs and zebras and giraffes and monkeys and many creatures you've never even heard of and some you never ever want to meet, like the black mamba.
On this particular day we'd been up since 5 a.m., and by late that afternoon I was beginning to think we'd never see anything other than big sky and empty plains. And then, as the poet wrote:
onetwothreefourfive lionsjustlikethat.
The big cat I was watching turned out to have only one eye. She was just a please-pass-the-salt length away from our vehicle.
The lioness moved away a little and rolled on her back with a delightful arch, pawing the air in a contented stretch. She could have killed me in a second. The guide became serious: "Stay in the vehicle, hands inside ... don't even stand up ... her belly is full but she will still attack." He even wagged his finger.
There aren't many rules on safari, but here's a very important one they tell you in capital letters with a finger wagging and a pause between each word:
"DO ... NOT ... LEAVE ...YOUR ...TENT ... ALONE ... AT ... NIGHT."
Lions and leopards and elephants wander through the camp. Sometimes there's a python. Oh, and there's the black mamba. The guides thoughtfully leave a red Klaxon horn by your bedside if you see something nasty and need to summon help.
uuu
"Happy birthday, John," I said to a new traveling companion.
John, from England, celebrated his 81st birthday on the Okavango.
"Don't know how many I've got left old chap," he said. "Thought we'd make this one a bit special."
John was with Brigitte, a lively 70-year-old and his wife of 50 years. They both have a yes-we-can view of life.
"We're here to see the birds," she said. "Yes, elephants are magnificent, but have you ever really looked at the birds?"
No, I hadn't. So I had no idea birds could be so wonderful. The Okavango has more than 500 species, which seems like more than enough even for fanatics like John and Brigitte, who can identify a bird from the beat of its wings as it stirs the heat. ...thwuck thwuck (there's an African fish eagle) ... prrrup prrrup prrrup (it's a brown-crowned tchagra), schjoo schjoo schjoo (there goes a red-eye dove).
We were in the Land Rover watching a hippo in a pool snort his displeasure at our presence when a black egret showed up to dance for us. Then it arched its wings over its head like an umbrella, reducing the glare of the water so it could peck for fish. And along came a knob-billed duck. Then a Jesus jacana, so-called because it seems to walk on water.
I came to admire John's spirit. The night before, he hadn't closed his tent flap properly and a baboon, we think, got in and stole his dentures.
Can he enjoy the rest of his holiday without teeth? Yes-he-can.
For the next three days, John seemed to live happily on porridge, gin and good humor.
uuu
I traveled across the Okavango with Wilderness Safaris, owned by a group of like-minded wildlife enthusiasts who tread very lightly as they go about the business of showing the remote glory of the Third World to First World travelers.
The Okavango gets its water from the north, in Angola and Namibia. Water that turns into thousands of rivers and streams that are then sucked dry by the sands of the Kalahari to the south.
Mostly we traveled the Okavango by Land Rover. But much of the year a large portion of the delta is under shallow water and transport is by mekoro, a sort of dugout canoe propelled by a pole. Swishing along this way gets you close up to the water-life, a natural history lesson in the field, so to speak. As part of the training that gets the guides their government certificate, they can tell when a harmless looking log is about to turn into a crocodile.
Mekoro travel is delightful in many ways -- you can pull up a water lily, like the ones in the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, nip off the flower and suck up the water through the stem. It's sort of a natural water purifier with the pith catching the bad bits.
Wilderness Safaris' camps stand in green contrast to some other companies in neighboring African countries that might have a dozen tourist-filled Land Rovers spraying dirt while driving figure eights around a bewildered lion. The Botswanan government safari policy is low volume and high prices, which translates into fewer tourists and a lighter tread on the environment..
"We leave as much intact as we possibly can and we don't interfere," says Chris Roche, a former Wilderness guide now based at the head office in Johannesburg.
"If we find a cub abandoned by its mother, we leave it," he adds. "We don't take it in and feed the darling from a baby bottle. Yep, little Elsa is on her own."
He has a lot to say about treading lightly and it's all worth listening to:
• Camps are set up above ground so as not to compact the soil and interrupt animal movements.
• Special attention is paid to waste disposal so that grey water can be released into the environment without contaminating the water table.
• Plastic and other rubbish are transported to towns for recycling.
• Ozone-friendly "doom" is sprayed to keep mosquitoes away. (Although I don't know how well it worked because I was fondling the pink bumps on my arms a week after getting home. Calling them the love bites of Botswana made them itch less.)
• Camps have solar panels to supplement the electricity supply.
But make no mistake, this is safari on the chic. You get great -- and sometimes unusual -- local food, fine African wine, luxurious tents (but close the flaps at night) tricked out with furniture and bath tubs and staff who does your laundry -- except they won't wash your underwear because of "local tradition." I never did figure that one out.
uuu
Simply getting to the Okavango is an adventure in itself. After flying from O'Hare to Washington, D.C., it's another 16 hours by South African Airways to Joburg. Then it's two hours folded into a small plane up to Maun. Next is an hour crouched in a very small plane over the delta, flying low enough to see elephants flick their tails.
Suddenly there's a stick of chewing gum down on the green landscape. It's our landing strip. No air traffic control here. The pilot takes a good look around before landing. If he spots impalas on the strip, he'll buzz them off and fly around for another approach.
To tell you the truth, impalas are boring after you've seen your first hundred. And I couldn't see the point of the giraffes. The elephants were marvelously majestic. The hippos stayed mostly underwater, harumphing. The leopards stretched out in the shade with one spotted lady perched in a tree, lying along the branch licking herself, just like you see in the calendars.
But the lions were the safari stars. One morning we tracked a pride on the hunt for buffalo. Five lions -- including the one missing an eye thanks to a previous encounter with a pointy horn -- watched the 1,000-strong herd for two hours, looking for weakness. And then, with no warning that I could see, the lions pounced. There was blood and claws and screams and dust. I was biting the inside of my cheek to remind myself yes, I really am this close and really am seeing all this.
After 15 minutes of noisy battle, the big boys of the buffalo herd drove the lions away with their horns and hooves.
The lions, bruised and sulking, left as losers. The buffalos win more often than you might think. Later, the lions tracked a baby warthog, drove off its mother and ate it. And if you ask me, they didn't share very nicely.
I've never seen anything like that fight with the buffalo herd. If you want to see it yourself, go to YouTube and search for "Okavango lion buffalo hunt."
And some day, maybe on your 81st birthday, take the sage advice of my pal. Do something for your soul. See things you've never seen before. Reach out. See some great nature before the nature all disappears. Get away.
Michael Cooke is the former editor in chief of the Chicago Sun-Times.