in Botswana Tom and Darren at Bana Ba Metsi,. This involved a 6 hour bus ride,
1 hour combi, a dodgy ferry and then a 45k hitch. All was
accomplished within a day but not without its problems and experiences. Which started with what should have been the easiest bit ; boarding the bus. This literally means scrumming down and charging for the door (hoping that you don’t fall over), once on you find a seat quickly and watch the bus fill up till all the seats are gone. Then they bring even more people on and they start to sit on people’ laps! We ended up with nearly every seat having two people on it and there being
queue, two abreast, in the alley waiting for anyone to move an inch so that they could sit down. This is fine for the first half an hour but for a six hours bus journey I think it’s a bit much, I’m pretty sure the sides of the bus were bending.
After about 5 hours I started wishing that we could just arrive so that we could unload the bus but that would have been easy and ‘non African, so what happened was something African, the bus broke down in the middle of know where, with no phone reception! We were all told to get off the bus whilst they fixed it, an hour later standing in the mid day sun, the bus was fixed and we all scrambled back on and headed for Shakawe.I got off the bus, happy to breath some fresh air, and then tried to find a combi. I soon established that there was only one and because of the
bus breaking down we had missed it. So we sat around at the bus stop ( a
stick in the ground) and waited for it to come back, when it arrived it was
packed full of people but, in the non deterred African way, we all
crammed into it, with people getting on the roof with the bags and some
on the back, and off we set to the ferry. At the ferry we just managed to
get on one that was going our way. On the other side I started to walk and
hitch; I got about 10k with many cars not stopping so I decided that I
would walk a bit further and then phone Darren to come and get me. He arrived
soon after and took me to their project; I was greeted by some of their
kids and then shown to their house, we stayed the night.
In the morning we got a lift to the road and then sat around in the shade waiting for a passing car; luckily the first car that passed ( after about an hour)
was happy to give us a lift so we piled into the back of the buky (like
a pick up truck but with a smaller cab and a bigger back) and settled in
for the drive. All was going well until about an hour into the journey when there was a massive bang and the front cow bar came off, ripped the water pipe out
and bent the front bumper, so we had to stop and fix it which was easy
enough. Then we were back on our way; we eventually got to the cross
roads were we were getting out and then got another hitch to the river
side. We took a mokoro (local dug out tree log which acts like a canoe) to the island were we where we staying for the next 2 days. When we eventually got there we found out that we were supposed to bring our own food, so we got a boat back to the main land, borrowed a car and went into town to buy food from the local shop (a
shipping container). Then back to the island to start our weekend,!
We did pretty much nothing but chill, talk and a sunset mokoro ride the
whole weekend but it was just what we needed. At the end of the weekend we
left and got another hitch with 6 other locals, one of which was quite
large, all crammed into the back of another buky. We got back to their
project a lot faster and still had a whole day to spare, so we went
swimming with the kids, which translates as them trying to drown us! Then did some manual work in the afternoon and chilled in the evening and just chatted.
On Tuesday the heavens opened and it looked like I was going to be stuck there, I was supposed to be leaving that day. Then Steve, their boss, told me that he was driving back to Maun and I could get a lift with him so all was good. We got about 200kms and he pulled over in the middle of no where saying that this was where we were spending the night. He got out a tarpaulin, made himself a shelter, and went to
bed ! He had locked the car so I decided that the safest place was on the
roof of the car so that’s where I slept; under the millions of stars and
an amazing lighting storm in the distance. We were up very early and he
dropped me off at the centre where I went straight to work.
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