No Gnus is Good Gnus

On Monday morning, I left Zimbabwe to go on another safari, this time in Botswana. As promised, the setting was absolutely beautiful. In addition to the dry bushy-type landscape that I saw in South Africa, the area I visited in Botswana also had lush, grassy floodplains (which look just like it sounds). There were flat grassy areas as far as the eye could see, interrupted in spots by the Chobe River and other little water inlets.

My room at the game lodge was more like a hotel than a game camp. (Apparently Liz Taylor and Richard Burton got married there for the second time in the 1970's.) In any case, the view from my room was spectacular -- there was full wall of windows that looked across the very narrow Chobe River to Namibia, where a herd of elephants was grazing. (I had no idea that the game lodge was only about 50 yards from Namibia.)

The game lodge is in a national park in Botswana, so you can't go off the roads like we could in the private game reserve in South Africa. This means that you don't get to see the animals as closely, and you can't follow them through the bush. On the other hand, the sheer number of animals hanging out in Botswana was far greater than SA. Every ten minutes or so, we'd stumble onto a new herd of elephants. That's one of the impressive things about being on a safari, period -- instead of seeing three or four elephants in a zoo, you see dozens at a time.

Though the Botswana park had more animals (in terms of numbers), there seemed to be less variety than SA. Most of what I saw were giraffes and elephants and various varieties of 'lopes. Unfortunately, giraffes and elephants don't do much more than eat, so it can get kind of boring. I also saw a gun (wildebeest), which I had been dying to see. Turns out they are probably the second ugliest animal in nature, after the warthog. That's unfortunate, since I have had a strange fascination with gnus dating back to the days of newsman Gary Gnu on The Great Space Coaster.

The game lodge was huge by African standards -- some 60 people were staying there. As a result, it lacked the warm and fuzzy feeling that I understand is pretty typical of the smaller camps, and that I myself reveled in while staying in SA. Still, I managed to meet some interesting people while I was there -- including, if you can believe the odds, an associate who currently works at my old firm (Washington office, though, not NYC).

Monday night, I ended up having drinks with a random group of people, that included two photographers (traveling separately), a Botswana tourism official, and an Irish woman. We talked for quite a while, and when it came time for me to head back to my side of the lodge, it was pretty late. Whereas the camp in SA didn't let you walk around at night alone, the Botswana lodge had said it was okay to walk on the lit-paths.

So, I headed off on one of the lit paths towards my room. I was about a third of the way there, when I realized that the whole common area of the lodge was pitch black, and I was going to have to walk through that to get to my room. I mustered up all my courage and started to head through. Then, I heard a rustling, and had a mini-heart attack. I was sure a lion was about to eat me. Some chairs moved, I held my breath...and a huge, gargantuan porcupine waddled out of the dining area right onto the path I needed to walk on. I know porcupines are more friend than foe, but I'd never seen one in person, and it was huge. And I was kind of tipsy.

I ended up running back to the patio where the others were still having drinks, and the Botswana tourism official -- a very petite woman and unlikely bodyguard -- kindly walked me back to my room. (She had worked at the lodge before, and apparently has no fear of deadly porcupines.)

The rest of my stay was fairly uneventful. Lovely landscapes, nice people, but no further porcupine or gnu sightings.

Yesterday, I left Botswana for Cape Town, where I'll be for the next few days, at least. So far, me likey. As much as I loved visiting the nature reserves and parks, it's nice to be back in civilization for a while.