An early morning, because the bus ride to Serowe is four hours, and we wanted to make sure we had some time to walk around when we got there. MK decided not to go because she was feeling bad and she needed to work on her med school applications. Bummer. ☹
Left at 9:15, only fifteen minutes after our planned departure time because Lina for some reason hadn’t packed yet. Walked to the west gate to catch a combi to the bus rank. Unfortunately we couldn’t remember which combi we were supposed to take, because we took a cab the last time, but Lina thought it was the Broadhurst 5 (opposite direction from last night). The first one that came had room, amazingly enough, so we hopped in and were there in about 7 minutes. We were super confused, because a) it was so much faster than the last time we went to the bus ranks, and b) we weren’t actually at the bus rank. Julia and Lina haggled with the driver a bit out of frustration, but then we just decided to walk back to the main road. Luckily the next person we asked was more articulate than our driver had been, and explained that we were just up the street from the bus rank. We walked in the indicated direction, and sure enough, we were on the far side (the bus stop is actually split by a highway, and you have to walk across a skybridge to get to the other side). That problem resolved, we quickly found the row for the bus to Serowe, and after a bathroom stop for Olivia and a phone credit buying mission for me, we were off!
Like last weekend, the bus to Serowe was a big tour bus, because it was a longer trip. The seats were fairly comfortable, and luckily the bus wasn’t full, so we ended up spreading out across two rows. We played “I’m going on a picnic” again, but it was harder with four people, and poor Olivia had started to get some indigestion before we left, so the game died out after a while and people went to sleep. Lina and I did a crossword, which proved to be virtually impossible. Then Lina fell asleep, and I worked on my blog (hand-written, because I didn’t bring my computer, oh my!). We stopped after about 2 hours for a bathroom/food stop, and all hell broke loose. Basically vendors just hang out at bus stops waiting for buses to come, then they all rush on at once and compete with one another in the meager space available in the tiny aisle of a bus to sell as much as they can in the 5 minutes that the bus is stopped. Usually this would just be purely entertaining, because I didn’t want to buy anything and they quickly lose interest in me, but unfortunately, Lina wanted a drink. Two of the male vendors were seriously SHOVING one another while they leaned over my seat to push their drinks in Lina’s face. It was incredibly overwhelming.
At the next stop, we faced a similar situation, except all three of them got off to go to the bathroom, and I stayed to watch our stuff. Most of the vendors lost interest in me, except one, who leaned over the row of seats in front of me and proceeded to stare me down for 5 minutes. I kept saying I didn’t want anything, and after a few minutes of this, she replied, “I want you to buy a drink for me.” It took a couple of repetitions before I realized what she meant, at which point I replied, very uncomfortably, that I couldn’t. An older woman who was also selling things and had lingered behind my seat (possibly touching my hair – creepy, but that’s what it felt like) said something in Setswana to her and made a swiping motion. My best guess is that she was telling the girl that foreigners only use credit cards. I was quite alright with her applying that stereotype if it meant that they would leave me alone. Yeah, I’m a horrible person. Not only that, but then the bus started moving forward before Julia, Lina and Olivia had come back, so I sprinted down the aisle to tell the driver to stop. Luckily the ticket girl knew they hadn’t come back, and as soon as she saw me she told me not to worry, they were just moving the bus to a different spot.
We finally made it to Serowe and disembarked, at which point we were immediately rushed by people offering us taxis. We knew that we needed to find the bus to Orapa to get to the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, where we were going to be staying, so we politely declined. We ate lunches that we had brought, made a bathroom stop, then set off to check out the town. We realized that we didn’t know whether or not we could drink the water there (it’s safe in Gabs), so we decided not to risk it and bought water bottles at a grocery store. Our walk about town lasted about another 10 minutes, then we concluded that there really wasn’t all that much to see and we all just kind of wanted to sit and chill, so we walked back to the bus station.
We found a bus to Maun, another city in northern Botswana, that would apparently drop us at the Sanctuary on our way there. This bus was WAAAAAAY more packed than the first one, and we had to spread out to get the available seats scattered all over the bus. I ended up in the back, next to an old woman and man. After a little while, the man started chatting with me – he was some kind of supervisor in the Ministry of Environment and something or rather, and his job was to manage forest conservation. Pretty neat actually. Deforestation isn’t a huge problem in Botswana, because a large portion of the country is desert, but in the northern part of the country near the Okavango Delta, the climate is much more tropical. Botswana doesn’t have a well-developed construction or manufacturing industry, but people will apparently chop down trees to sell across the border in Zimbabwe or Zambia. He told me that one of the Ministry’s programs involves growing saplings, and a few times a year they have a big event in which they distribute the saplings to people around the country to plant. In some ways, I think Botswana may have better ideas about taking care of the environment than we do (although there’s no recycling here, at least not anything significant, and every combi we’ve ever ridden in has reeked of exhaust fumes).
After spending a good 20 to 30 minutes packed like sardines on the bus, we stopped, and the driver called out, “Whites, get off!,” which the whole bus found wildly entertaining. Somehow I managed to squeeze out from all the way in the back, and we found ourselves standing basically in the middle of nowhere. Don’t worry, they hadn’t left us stranded, we were at the sanctuary – it just looked like the middle of nowhere. We went in and found the office where we were supposed to check in. The poor desk clerk unfortunately didn’t speak very good English, so we confused her a great deal, and she was unhappy with us because we hadn’t brought a car. First of all, no one told us we needed a car, and we can’t drive here anyway. We got charged a fee to have a driver and combi at the sanctuary drive us to our chalet and back for dinner, but it wasn’t expensive, so we signed on the dotted line and went our merry way. Our driver was very chatty, and he said that he had lived in Miami and worked at Disneyworld (two facts which confused me a bit) – we found out later that the other employees apparently call him “America.”
We were pleasantly surprised when we got to our chalet – when we had made the reservation, we had chosen the cheaper chalet option, one that was unelectrified and had no bathroom. However, we were charged a cheaper rate than the one that had been quoted on the phone AND our chalet had electricity, a working toilet, an electric kettle, and FOUR beds. We were thrilled. After setting our stuff down, we took a walk outside, because it wasn’t quite dark yet. We saw some really neat, electric blue birds, and wasted a great deal of time stalking them trying to get pictures, which was a ridiculous endeavor in the first place because none of us had a camera nice enough to take decent pictures of them except Lina. We eventually gave up and dragged our table and chairs outside to sit in the dusk and do crosswords together until dinner. We got excited again about trying to take pictures of a Zazu bird (actually called a yellow hornbill, but the Lion King names are so much funner) in a tree really close to us, then felt supremely stupid when it came up to us 20 minutes later while we were sitting and doing puzzles.
We had asked the driver to come back and get us at 6 for dinner. The sun went down, and the temperature started dropping, so we went back inside to wait. And wait and wait and wait. It was pitch black outside, but by 6:30 there was no sign of our driver. He had given us a number to call, because he said that he wouldn’t be the one to pick us up, but someone would come for us. As we pulled out our phones to check on our transportation status, we realized that none of us had cell phone signal. Great. The only food we had left was a bunch of oranges, apples, and fruit rolls from lunch, and some crackers that we had bought to help settle Olivia’s stomach. It was also incredibly cold. Like we all put on all the clothes we had and we were still freezing, kind of cold.
After a while, I decided to go outside to try to find some cell signal. I wandered around waving my phone in the air like a crazy person, then shouted much louder than was necessary when I finally got a bar of reception. I could only get it if I held the phone up over my head, though, so Lina came out to call with me, and I dialed the number on speaker phone. When the receptionist answered, she proceeded to jump up and down, shouting into the phone. This proved to be so hilarious to both of us that it took several minutes for the poor woman on the other end to understand what we were calling about, and she certainly had no idea what we were laughing about, though by the end of the call I think she had decided that we were so insane that she started laughing too. Maybe you had to be there. I could hardly breathe I was laughing so hard.
20 minutes later, the driver finally pulled up, and he and his passenger thought we were insane too, because we opened the door and started jumping up and down and clapping like 5-year-olds when we saw them. They drove us to dinner, and we chatted with the other passenger, who was an Australian named Robin who was employed by the Sanctuary for brush/fire control. He was friendly, though he clearly thought that we were ridiculous for acting like we were stranded when they didn’t show up at the appropriate time. Yeah, we did a lot to improve the American image on this trip.
We had dinner at the lodge, which was slightly warmer, but not much. We realized that the reason that our chalet and the lodge were so cold was because even though they have roofs, there’s a gap between the roof and walls that let’s ALLLLL the cold air in (you’ll have to look at the pictures to understand). We had yummy dinners, and about 20 million cups of hot tea each. We were feeling fairly toasty by the time we left, though the quote of the trip was Olivia’s “Is that an ice cube?” as we were looking at a potted plant next to the door. Someone had apparently poured out their drink, but it was so cold that the ice cube hadn’t melted. Great.
Our original driver, “America,” was at the lodge when we showed up for dinner, and he had apparently mentioned us to another group of ladies staying at the Sanctuary who worked for the UN in Gabs. They were having a fire and had invited us to join them, so we decided to be friendly and check it out. One of them was named Princess, and they were very friendly, though much older, Batswana who were very interested in us. We chatted for a while, and Robin came also, so he told us a little bit about the southern hemisphere’s constellations and a weird fruit on the tree next to us. It was called monkey oranges, and the Setswana word for it was mohorohowatsi (that’s an entirely phonetic spelling by the way, please don’t take my word for it that that’s right). The entire concept of the Southern Cross was extremely difficult for us to grasp, and took about 15 minutes and three people explaining it for us to grasp. Again, doing a lot of good things for our image.
After 20 or 30 minutes, we decided to leave, and unfortunately we think we kind of offended the ladies because we didn’t want to give them our phone numbers. They were very nice, and said they wanted to invite us to a braai at their house in Gabs, but we’re going to be traveling every weekend between now and when we leave. We also have just become really wary of giving our numbers to people. Oh well, we tried to be social.
We got back to chalet and grudgingly changed into our (freezing cold) pajamas, then put back on all the other clothes we’d had on before, and immediately crawled into bed. Each bed had two pretty thick comforters on it, and despite my anxiety about a spider we had seen earlier (which I tried unsuccessfully to kill -- twice), fell right to sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment