Day 34 – Three showers in one day!

Maun, Discovery B&B

Today we had a mokoro trip and game walk in the Okavango Delta.. We were delivered to the pickup point by our gracious hosts, and on arrival we were provided with some ponchos to keep us dry, as it’s currently the wet season and it pretty much rains every day, though when and for how long is quite unpredictable.

We hopped into a motor boat to take us to the start of the trip proper, which was in a small village called Boro. At Boro, we transferred to the mokoro, a low dugout style canoe, which is propelled using a long pole. This one was fibreglass, but traditionally they were made from trees.

It was quite a pleasant journey as we glided through the water lilies and reeds while our guide pointed out things of interest. As we progressed the reeds got taller, and the channel we were following became narrower, until we were holding our hands up to keep from getting speared through the cheek by a stray reed. It was also starting to warm up, and it looked like we might have a beautiful day,

After passing through a huge area covered with water lilies, we stopped at an island, where we were told we were going for a walk. This was where we hoped to see some animals – elephants, hippos etc. For some reason we thought this bit wasn’t going to take long, so we left our ponchos in the mokoro. About 25 minutes into our “short” walk, the sky got darker, the wind picked up, and it started to rain. Five minutes later we were totally drenched! Being the intrepid adventurers that we are, we carried on, hoping the rain would stop ….. but it didn’t! M was keen to continue (we weren’t gong to get any wetter!) – but by this time K had had enough, and decided to abort the walk, so we turned back, and this time the nice sandy trail we’d followed in had become a waterlogged trench! The only exotic animal we got to see on our “game walk” was a chameleon.

We finally made it back to the boat, K put her poncho on (better late than never – but as she puts it “did you mention how blinking cold I was?”). We then headed back to Boro in the mokoro, and of course on the way back the weather improved, so by the time we had returned to our original starting point (which included an hour and a half waiting at Boro for the motor boat, which was actually quite interesting, as it gave us an insight into modern African village life, as opposed to the Himba version) the weather was quite nice!

And so ends the sad and sorry tale of our first failed African Expedition.