Original Story Published by: Daniel Noll for Uncornered Market
(Above) Silence. Floating in a mokoro (dugout canoe) in the Okavango Delta.
There's nothing so rare these days as time to one's thoughts and sensations.
As our 12-seater Cessna went wheels up from the runway with a lift of air underneath, I felt one part twinge of fear, another part exhilaration. We settled a few thousand feet above the brush-dappled Kalahari sands, and I considered the expanse of land beneath me.
As we descended I could see tiny elephants, almost toy-like in their proportion at this height, gathered around a vanishing watering hole. These creatures once appeared huge, yet now appeared as dots on the landscape below, set pieces in a game of life that played out below.
I often advocate on-the-ground travel to avoid the conflation of flyover. However, flying between remote safari camps – Camp Xakanaxa, Camp Okavango, and Leroo La Tau in northern Botswana’s Kalahari Desert and Okavango Delta — was required to expediently cover distance. It also lent perspective to what we’d witnessed on the ground and enhanced our comprehension of the contours and remoteness of the geography.
To see this patch of Earth — far away, then later up close — was instructive. It informed my growing sense of the world, and of my self.
In retrospect, that was the point of this segment of our journey in Botswana: five days to unplug and pivot the focus, to tune into sensation.
Camp Xakanaxa: Choosing to Disconnect
Our bush plane touched down on a dirt runway cleared of animals by the driving gusts from the aircraft that landed just before ours. This somewhat primitive process is requisite when you wish to share an environment with wildlife. It’s their home turf, after all.
From the dust of the runway, we transferred by 4×4 over hardened Kalahari sand to Camp Xakanaxain the Moremi Game Reserve.
Later, we floated straight into the waters of Xakanaxa Lagoon and Khwai River in the Okavango Delta. The hippos we searched for, those who helped carve the so-called “hippo highway” channel waterways by their trampling of pampas grass and depression of the root systems underneath, elude us. As we crane our necks and search for them in the waning light of the afternoon, we are awarded something else: birds.
Exotic birds, a continuous reel of novel, winged creatures I’d never before seen or imagined. The African jacana or Jesus bird, one of the dozens of species we would see during our time on the delta, convinced us to track it through the reeds, until we reached another turn to admire the epic wingspan of a passing saddle billed stork.
Crossing our own wake, we notice the shallow delta waters rise and fall across the tops of tall grass. In an almost-too-perfect landscape, we watch in silence, in respectful awe, the fading sun whose refraction turned shades of violet in a darkening horizon.
Amidst final light, we coasted on what seemed like liquid glass toward home.
