Thursday, July 10, 2025

Under the Southern Cross

Under the Southern Cross

 

“Mr. Daniel.”  The voice was barely audible.

 

“Wake up call.”

 

It was 5:30 am on day four of a safari in northern Botswana.  I had not slept well the night before.  Just before nodding off, I’d hear a loud roar directly behind my luxuriant cabin.  It spooked me enough to prevent me from getting back to sleep right away.

 

I had purchased a package that gave me three nights in the Okavango Delta, another three nights in Chobe National Park and two nights at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.  Bush flights, all meals, transfers. Pampering included.

 

Breakfast is served on a long table, buffet style.  It’s still dark at 6:00 am and the table is lit with four lanterns.  It’s also cold and we’re bundled in sweater, scarf and light jacket.  It is the 7th week of autumn and at the 17th latitude south it's downright chilly before the sun rises.

 

We set off at 6:30.  Each camp has dedicated, professional guides who not only drive, but have the eyes of hawks and can spot animals long before we see them.  They can also answer any question thrown their way.  Life span, gestation, mating habits.  Name it, they know it.

 

Botswana is blessed with some of the greatest wildlife spectacles on earth.  There are more elephants here than any other place on the globe.  I am not disappointed.

 

Animals are illusive.  This is not a zoo.  Animals are where they choose to be, and every game drive is an adventure in hope.  But because this park in general is one on the most active in Africa, it did not take long to see spottings.  Elephants 30 yards off the road, herds of grazing impalas, baboons everywhere.  Giraffes are my favorite.  While other animals ignored us, the giraffe often seemed to stop and stare at us, as if they were checking us out as much as we were checking them out.

 

I have spent weeks trying to find the right words to describe what I’ve experienced.  I can plug in astoundingextraordinaryamazing into my thesaurus but I still end up with words insufficient enough to describe this.  It was my very good fortune to meet a fellow traveler, Tanya M from Cape Town, who was actually working her way from lodge to lodge and evaluating them for a safari company she worked with.  She seemed to follow me a day behind each destination.  We became fast friends.  At dinner one evening we were discussing this.  Her first language is Afrikans, a variant of Dutch.  ONGELLOOFLIK, she said one evening.  “That’s the word.”  ONGELLOOFLIK. It’s a Dutch word that means awesome, but it goes beyond that.  But more on that later.

 

I finally choose Edenic.  Let’s face it, our entire exposure to wild African animals is though zoos, National Geographic, toys, stuffed animals, and children’s literature.  I remember the 6’ high lush giraffes at FAO Schwartz on 5th Avenue years ago when my father brought me to New York.  I can not help thinking of George and Martha when I see hippos in shallow water, or Babar when I see the myriad of elephants.  We are suspended in unreality when it comes to wild animals.  It’s easy to anthropomorphize them into something they are not.  The majority of them are wild, savage animals.  It is not our experience to see them up close in their natural habitat.  Instead, they became cute and cuddly and fun.  Even in the wild, there’s a tendency to want to get out of the Land Rover, walk over to a parade of elephants and say “Hey….  I loved Babar when I was a kid.  Know him?”

 

Edenic it was. Within the Delta and again in Chobe, the closest place I can identify to describe the landscape was Miner Woods.  Truly.  While the Delta is savannah, Chobe is woodland; more than once I had the feeling I was tooling through blueberry territory on the Flat Rock.  But that’s about where it ends.  It is no Eden. Beyond the extraordinariness of it, was the constant life and death struggle to survive.  That sleek impala?  Dinner for a lion.  That lame zebra who trailed behind the rest of his pack?  He won’t survive the month of May.  Edenic is might be to us, but we live in a fallen world and Eden is a myth.

 

While Miner is large for what it is, both the Delta and Chobe comprise thousands of square miles.  All protected.  For more than 60 years Botswana has safeguarded its natural treasures and its animals.  As a result, animals are somewhat “domesticated,” but only in the sense that they aren’t threatened by vehicles.  There is no such thing as “taking a walk.”  Anywhere.  (At both camps, escorts were required to walk us to our rooms after dinner.)  Even exiting the Land Rover to pee meant walking behind the truck, pushing my back as close to vehicle as possible, then quickly doing my business. Dangerous mammals aside, black mambos and snouted cobras hid in lairs waiting for the gringo to approach.  I was very obedient when the guide said “Don’t venture too far Mr. Daniel.”

 

Thank god I never had to do a number 2.

 

What I saw in the six days in the middle of Botswana could fill a small encyclopedia of African wildlife. Privilege, was the only word I could think of to express my gratitude for this great gift.  Leopards, a lioness and her cubs, zebras, fun flocks of guinea hens, giant eagles, kudus, one cheetah eating a recently killed impala, hippos, elephants, jackals, impalas everywhere, waterbucks and reedbucks, crocodiles, monitor lizards, a spotted genet, hyaenas.  I saw more, much more.  Edenic.

 

In the Delta and within Chobe, our land Rover stopped to let a tower of giraffes, herds of impala or a dazzle of zebras pass the road.  Elephants, who only emerged from within the woods during the heat of the morning, were often no more than twenty feet away.  Once, we were too close to a mother and her calf who got within three feet of me. I was sitting in the front seat.  “GRRR,” she announced, although it wasn’t “GRR.” It was guttural and a sound of warning.  Whatever the sound was, she let us know we were too close.

 

The Delta and Chobe a Disney set or some theme park.  It was the real thing, and as such it had a surreal quality about it. How can place like this truly exist for real, when all we ever see are protypes of it?  Warthogs come close to lodges, mongoose and baboons hang around the Namibia/Botswana border station, rare and endangered wild dogs cool under umbrella trees, and elephants play in rivers.

 

I never did see a lion, which I guess is OK.  There’s always something left for another time.

 

But I did see the Southern Cross.  Each night, I found a safe place from as much ambient light as possible.  I’d lay down a blanket and study the night sky.  The constellation has always grounded me in the southern hemisphere, and memories of it are as keen as Orion straddling Mt. Everest in Tibet or rising over the island of Koh Samui, Thailand on Christmas Eve north of the equator.

 

The Southern Cross and I have shared time in the Atacama Desert of Chile, on Bolivia’s Island of the Sun and on the rim of Ayer’s Rock in Australia.  Much like the Big Dipper, which always points to home, the Southern Cross tells me I’m far, far from home.

 

On the last morning I was in Chobe Elephant Camp the young woman who cleaned my room and I bumped into each other.

 

“I moved your sandals off the porch and into the lodge, Mr. Daniel.  If I don’t, the baboons will carry them off.”

 

Well, that woke me up.  It’s not every day someone tells you baboons will carry off your shoes.  

 

I plan to return.  Now…to find the time.

 

 

 

 

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