Day 16

We had another long drive ahead of us and collected more stamps in our passports at the border with Botswana. I thought that this too went quite smoothly, we were even allowed by one of the soldiers to take pictures of the monkeys roaming on the grounds there. But then, when we were about to drive through the gate out of the border area there was one final inspection and the officer performing the inspection went straight for the fridge in our truck to find the meat that was hidden at the bottom of it. Diamonds are the most important export product of Botswana, that has made this country relatively rich and all inhabitants seem to reasonably profit from this. Interesting detail is that the diamonds weren’t discovered until a few months after Great Britain had gotten rid of what they thought was a quite uninteresting piece of land anyway. When it comes to sticking it to your colonial rulers, I guess this is about as good as it gets. And although in this particular example, those left behind were likely quite happy about it, I wonder if this is one of the earliest examples of Britain coming out of a Brexit for the worse. Anyway, in addition to diamonds meat was an important export product and European trade laws had enforced strict rules to control mouth-and-foot disease and we were not allowed to bring raw meat across the border. Whereas spoiled Europeans would probably have left the meat behind, our cook unpacked the cooking gear from the truck and fried the meat on the spot, after which we were allowed to continue our way with the meat.
There were no more dirt roads in Botswana, but the potholes in the asphalt were big enough to even impress the Belgians. Our guide told us that in Zimbabwe, people joke that they were in Botswana and thought they saw a bunny on the road, only to find out when they came closer that it was a giraffe.
Throughout this trip we had seen cars and trucks in various states of decomposition along the roads, but in Botswana there were also many animals in similar states lining the road, including an elephant that only quite recently had transformed from a formidable animal into a nasty looking pile of meat and goo.
That evening after dinner we got a briefing for our trip to the Okavango delta the next day and two nights of camping in the wild. We were instructed to only pack a small backpack with the essentials for the next two days and leave our big bags or suitcases behind in the truck. We were also told not to wear bright colors as they are a dead giveaway for all the wildlife. And then this guy said something that we discussed extensively afterward as we were not quite sure what he meant, but to me it seemed like he was pointing out that we could not help having these white skins, so that that would be okay then.
As Willems back was not doing great and we would be stuck in the jungle for the next two days, he figured it may be wise to go for an upgrade to a lodge for this night and since I am a good friend, I joined him. The first lodge we walked into had a huge spider on the wall, so we got the one next to it. The shower in the lodge was very nice and it was very well possible to keep your stuff organized and dry in there. But when we went to sleep, I checked for spiders under the bed and to the side of it, only to release a little scream when I noticed a big spider on the wall next to my head while I was crouched over to look under the bed. Willem cursed the fact that I even went looking for spiders, as we were doing fine before, but only then started to realize that we lacked the guarantee of insect and arachnid-free sleep that we would have had in our tent. So we pulled our beds away from the wall, inspected the sheets and then spent the night barely sleeping on very poor matrasses.