Game for a private safari Times, 27/4/2002
There we were, sitting out under the canopy of the camelthorn trees at the Elephant Camp in Savuti, Northern Botswana, discussing the merits - yes, the merits - of indirect flights. 'They're what keep the crowds out,' purred Frank the Australian. 'You've ever been to the Masai Mara or Ngorongoro when the humans are massing?' shuddered this veteran of the safari scene.
Certainly, there's nothing direct about the business of arriving at one's Botswanan safari destination - in our case a flight to Johannesburg, another the following day up to Maun, Botswana's safari hub, before a final one in a six-seater Cessna to the sand strip at Savuti. Still, the protraction served a valuable purpose. If you're with Frank on the subject of East African game-drive log-jams, then rest assured that they don't exist in Botswana; there were times, indeed, when it seemed that we and one crowd-shy Australian were the only ones to have made it through to this prime African wilderness.
Still, Frank's deterrent argument might have sounded less persuasive but for a thoroughly recuperative night en route at the Westcliff Hotel in Johannesburg whose attractive terracotta villas spill down a terraced hillside Amalfi village-style. The hotel, which has been operating since 1998, is creating a reputation for itself as a safari base camp standing comparison with Zimbabwe's Victoria Falls Hotel or Nairobi's Norfolk Hotel - but with no venerable colonial past to breed complacency or stuffiness. It also boasts excellent views; from my room, I was even able to train my binoculars on my first game sighting - an elephant in the city zoo.
At the Elephant Camp, the first of three Gametrackers' properties we were to visit, I didn't need the binoculars. As the guests gathered for dinner - typical of Botswana, the camp sleeps 24 maximum - the floodlight revealed eight elephants flapping their ears around the waterhole. Over the swimming pool (raised, sensibly enough, to prevent the elephants bathing with the guests) a blizzard of bats descended.
The camp's twelve guest tents are spacious and luxurious, with fully-fitted bathrooms and with decks that look out over the Savuti Channel which some seismic shift caused to run dry twenty years ago. I sat in a planter's chair through one afternoon siesta and watched the elephants following the old riverbed down to the waterhole. They passed within fifteen feet of me, grey and dusty, and returned a lustrous mocha after their soaking. They made slow progress, pausing singly in the pooled shade of each thorn tree where they rested on three hooves and left the third hanging in the air, strangely fey, before moving on.
The tents are robust. Savuti is one of those thrillingly rare camps which, not content with offering mere spectacle, seems to reinvent the safari experience as something approaching a contact sport. This became clear to us with the discovery of what were apparently hyenas' teethmarks in one of the game-drive vehicle cool-boxes, though the cynics among us put the holes down to guest-impressing gratuitous marlin-spikery. We then learned that the hyenas had also invaded the bar area one recent night and put the camp to great expense by making a meal of the leather couches. Then there were the gurning baboons which habitually damaged the roof of the tent above the bar area by putting it through its paces as a dry-ski slope. As for the elephants, they often came into camp to shake the camelthorns; they considered the seed pods of these trees such a treat that the shaking was often concerted. Some of us did not sleep well at Savuti, palpitating through a long night of up-close and personal roars, trumpetings and snufflings that has come to seem an experience of rare privilege rather than of purgatory only after considerable retrospect. Frank, old hand though he was, even hit the panic button with which each guest is equipped when his tent began to shake violently from the attentions of one such elephant in the early hours. Even so, most of us heard of plans afoot to fence-in this unique camp with regret.
It was the end of the dry season, when the rain and heat were gathering. Fireball lilies and wild onion sprouted among the low growth of mopane and Kalahari appleleaf trees. Out on the wide expanses of the Savuti Marsh great elephant herds and rain clouds formed leaden bubbles along the horizon. In the cool of the late afternoon a pride of lions were rousing themselves, the cubs pouncing at their mothers' twitching tails. We drove back to camp with the coming of nightfall, the dense smell of wild sage in our nostrils.
A short flight by light aircraft brought us to the Khwai River Lodge, on the eastern edge of the Okavango Delta. The Khwai would usually be dry so late in the season, but last spring's rains over the Angolan mountains which feed the Okavango had been the best for twenty years. This desert land depends upon the rains to the extent that the local word for water, pula, is also the Botswanan toast as well as the name of the national currency. In this watery abundance a hippo grunted contentedly, a lily pad plastered piratically across one eye.
In the late afternoon, we drove into a concession area outside the reserve where the park regulations forbidding night drives, walking and off-track driving no longer applied. Now we could follow the elusive low-slung dapple of a fleeing leopard deep into the bush or leave the vehicle to examine bleached elephant bones, animal spoors or grasses. The game drive ended in a clearing where the camp staff had prepared aperitifs and were cooking impala sausages over a bush barbecue. This was a further addition to the impressive eating regime - two major performances at brunch and dinner with support acts prior to the day's outings at dawn and at tea time. We washed the sausages down with a chilled Chenin Blanc from South Africa, and watched lighting flaring through the rainclouds.
The next day, we flew deep into the heart of the Okavango delta. From a great height this wetscape seemed choked and scummy, with waterways that appeared as ugly sutures widening to stagnant ponds. But as we flew low over Eagle Island Camp, sat amidst a waterside glade of sausage trees, the channels were revealed as pristine expanses littered with pink waterlilies. We took to mokoros, the local kayaks, for aquatic game drives. The guides punted us along the clear-running reed streams through a confetti strew of unimaginably profuse birdlife; purple herons and fish eagles, jacanas and spurwing geese, crakes and sandpipers and, most beautiful of all, tiny malachite kingfishers. Lechwe deer and buffalo grazed in the marsh.
Back at camp, we swam in the pool before gathering at the simple bar at the water's edge. Fireflies twinkled and the peaks of a crocodile, nose and tail, showed above the darkening water.
'Pula,' we exclaimed, raising our glasses to the rains and to indirect flights.
Jeremy Seal was a guest of Carrier (01625 547010; www.carrier.co.uk) and of Orient-Express Hotels and Gametrackers. A 10-day safari with two nights each at Savute Elephant Camp [ED; Gametrackers calls the camp by the alternative Savute, but Savuti is in more common general use], Khwai River Lodge and Eagle Island Camp, and with two nights at the Westcliff, Johannesburg, costs from £2499 per person with Carrier.
Botswana is best visited between May and November, when the weather is largely dry and cool. Mosquitoes tend to become less of a problem late in the dry season; they were negligible by November. Even so, anti-malarial medication, efficient mosquito repellents and long sleeves and trousers at dawn and dusk are essential. Tsetse flies can also be an irritant. December-April is mostly wet and uncomfortably hot.
Botswana Information: 020 8400 6113
BEST OF BOTSWANA:
Mobile Safaris; Bush camping on the grand scale; stay in small, mobile but luxurious camps at exclusive-use campsites, either on set departures or in private groups. Carrier's 14-night set-departure 'A La Hemingway' safari includes five nights in mobile camps, from £3808 per person.
Walking Safaris: Walk the bush accompanied by an armed guide in the Selinda Concession, overnighting in permanent tented camps or in mobile camps (dome tents and bucket showers). From £1000 per person for five nights, not including flights, through Aardvark Safaris (01980 849160).
Riding Safaris; A six-day horseback safari through the Okavango, for competent riders only, is included in a two-week package from £3095 per person through Worldwide Journeys (0207 381 8638). Grand-scale elephant-back safaris are also on offer in the Okavango Delta, from £4825 per person for five nights through Art of Travel (01285 650011)
Self-drive; Safari Drive (01488 681611) offers fully equipped 4WDs for experienced safari hands keen to do their own driving, cooking, setting up camp and game-finding (vehicle, fuel and campsites for two weeks from £3400).
Desert; Two-night quad-biking expeditions across the remote Makgadikgadi Pans to the bizarre rock outcrop called Kubu Island, combined with three nights at the legendary 1940s-style Jack's and San camps. From £1850 per person, through Roxton Bailey Robinson (01488 683222), not including flights.
Budget; Exodus' 16-day Botswana Wilderness Safari, staying in campsites, from £1898 per person. Considerably cheaper than most camps is Oddball's Palm Island where guests sleep on bedrolls in dome tents and bring their own sleeping bags. From £105 per night per person, through Okavango Tours & Expeditions (0208 343 3283).
There we were, sitting out under the canopy of the camelthorn trees at the Elephant Camp in Savuti, Northern Botswana, discussing the merits - yes, the merits - of indirect flights. 'They're what keep the crowds out,' purred Frank the Australian. 'You've ever been to the Masai Mara or Ngorongoro when the humans are massing?' shuddered this veteran of the safari scene.
Certainly, there's nothing direct about the business of arriving at one's Botswanan safari destination - in our case a flight to Johannesburg, another the following day up to Maun, Botswana's safari hub, before a final one in a six-seater Cessna to the sand strip at Savuti. Still, the protraction served a valuable purpose. If you're with Frank on the subject of East African game-drive log-jams, then rest assured that they don't exist in Botswana; there were times, indeed, when it seemed that we and one crowd-shy Australian were the only ones to have made it through to this prime African wilderness.
Still, Frank's deterrent argument might have sounded less persuasive but for a thoroughly recuperative night en route at the Westcliff Hotel in Johannesburg whose attractive terracotta villas spill down a terraced hillside Amalfi village-style. The hotel, which has been operating since 1998, is creating a reputation for itself as a safari base camp standing comparison with Zimbabwe's Victoria Falls Hotel or Nairobi's Norfolk Hotel - but with no venerable colonial past to breed complacency or stuffiness. It also boasts excellent views; from my room, I was even able to train my binoculars on my first game sighting - an elephant in the city zoo.
At the Elephant Camp, the first of three Gametrackers' properties we were to visit, I didn't need the binoculars. As the guests gathered for dinner - typical of Botswana, the camp sleeps 24 maximum - the floodlight revealed eight elephants flapping their ears around the waterhole. Over the swimming pool (raised, sensibly enough, to prevent the elephants bathing with the guests) a blizzard of bats descended.
The camp's twelve guest tents are spacious and luxurious, with fully-fitted bathrooms and with decks that look out over the Savuti Channel which some seismic shift caused to run dry twenty years ago. I sat in a planter's chair through one afternoon siesta and watched the elephants following the old riverbed down to the waterhole. They passed within fifteen feet of me, grey and dusty, and returned a lustrous mocha after their soaking. They made slow progress, pausing singly in the pooled shade of each thorn tree where they rested on three hooves and left the third hanging in the air, strangely fey, before moving on.
The tents are robust. Savuti is one of those thrillingly rare camps which, not content with offering mere spectacle, seems to reinvent the safari experience as something approaching a contact sport. This became clear to us with the discovery of what were apparently hyenas' teethmarks in one of the game-drive vehicle cool-boxes, though the cynics among us put the holes down to guest-impressing gratuitous marlin-spikery. We then learned that the hyenas had also invaded the bar area one recent night and put the camp to great expense by making a meal of the leather couches. Then there were the gurning baboons which habitually damaged the roof of the tent above the bar area by putting it through its paces as a dry-ski slope. As for the elephants, they often came into camp to shake the camelthorns; they considered the seed pods of these trees such a treat that the shaking was often concerted. Some of us did not sleep well at Savuti, palpitating through a long night of up-close and personal roars, trumpetings and snufflings that has come to seem an experience of rare privilege rather than of purgatory only after considerable retrospect. Frank, old hand though he was, even hit the panic button with which each guest is equipped when his tent began to shake violently from the attentions of one such elephant in the early hours. Even so, most of us heard of plans afoot to fence-in this unique camp with regret.
It was the end of the dry season, when the rain and heat were gathering. Fireball lilies and wild onion sprouted among the low growth of mopane and Kalahari appleleaf trees. Out on the wide expanses of the Savuti Marsh great elephant herds and rain clouds formed leaden bubbles along the horizon. In the cool of the late afternoon a pride of lions were rousing themselves, the cubs pouncing at their mothers' twitching tails. We drove back to camp with the coming of nightfall, the dense smell of wild sage in our nostrils.
A short flight by light aircraft brought us to the Khwai River Lodge, on the eastern edge of the Okavango Delta. The Khwai would usually be dry so late in the season, but last spring's rains over the Angolan mountains which feed the Okavango had been the best for twenty years. This desert land depends upon the rains to the extent that the local word for water, pula, is also the Botswanan toast as well as the name of the national currency. In this watery abundance a hippo grunted contentedly, a lily pad plastered piratically across one eye.
In the late afternoon, we drove into a concession area outside the reserve where the park regulations forbidding night drives, walking and off-track driving no longer applied. Now we could follow the elusive low-slung dapple of a fleeing leopard deep into the bush or leave the vehicle to examine bleached elephant bones, animal spoors or grasses. The game drive ended in a clearing where the camp staff had prepared aperitifs and were cooking impala sausages over a bush barbecue. This was a further addition to the impressive eating regime - two major performances at brunch and dinner with support acts prior to the day's outings at dawn and at tea time. We washed the sausages down with a chilled Chenin Blanc from South Africa, and watched lighting flaring through the rainclouds.
The next day, we flew deep into the heart of the Okavango delta. From a great height this wetscape seemed choked and scummy, with waterways that appeared as ugly sutures widening to stagnant ponds. But as we flew low over Eagle Island Camp, sat amidst a waterside glade of sausage trees, the channels were revealed as pristine expanses littered with pink waterlilies. We took to mokoros, the local kayaks, for aquatic game drives. The guides punted us along the clear-running reed streams through a confetti strew of unimaginably profuse birdlife; purple herons and fish eagles, jacanas and spurwing geese, crakes and sandpipers and, most beautiful of all, tiny malachite kingfishers. Lechwe deer and buffalo grazed in the marsh.
Back at camp, we swam in the pool before gathering at the simple bar at the water's edge. Fireflies twinkled and the peaks of a crocodile, nose and tail, showed above the darkening water.
'Pula,' we exclaimed, raising our glasses to the rains and to indirect flights.
Jeremy Seal was a guest of Carrier (01625 547010; www.carrier.co.uk) and of Orient-Express Hotels and Gametrackers. A 10-day safari with two nights each at Savute Elephant Camp [ED; Gametrackers calls the camp by the alternative Savute, but Savuti is in more common general use], Khwai River Lodge and Eagle Island Camp, and with two nights at the Westcliff, Johannesburg, costs from £2499 per person with Carrier.
Botswana is best visited between May and November, when the weather is largely dry and cool. Mosquitoes tend to become less of a problem late in the dry season; they were negligible by November. Even so, anti-malarial medication, efficient mosquito repellents and long sleeves and trousers at dawn and dusk are essential. Tsetse flies can also be an irritant. December-April is mostly wet and uncomfortably hot.
Botswana Information: 020 8400 6113
BEST OF BOTSWANA:
Mobile Safaris; Bush camping on the grand scale; stay in small, mobile but luxurious camps at exclusive-use campsites, either on set departures or in private groups. Carrier's 14-night set-departure 'A La Hemingway' safari includes five nights in mobile camps, from £3808 per person.
Walking Safaris: Walk the bush accompanied by an armed guide in the Selinda Concession, overnighting in permanent tented camps or in mobile camps (dome tents and bucket showers). From £1000 per person for five nights, not including flights, through Aardvark Safaris (01980 849160).
Riding Safaris; A six-day horseback safari through the Okavango, for competent riders only, is included in a two-week package from £3095 per person through Worldwide Journeys (0207 381 8638). Grand-scale elephant-back safaris are also on offer in the Okavango Delta, from £4825 per person for five nights through Art of Travel (01285 650011)
Self-drive; Safari Drive (01488 681611) offers fully equipped 4WDs for experienced safari hands keen to do their own driving, cooking, setting up camp and game-finding (vehicle, fuel and campsites for two weeks from £3400).
Desert; Two-night quad-biking expeditions across the remote Makgadikgadi Pans to the bizarre rock outcrop called Kubu Island, combined with three nights at the legendary 1940s-style Jack's and San camps. From £1850 per person, through Roxton Bailey Robinson (01488 683222), not including flights.
Budget; Exodus' 16-day Botswana Wilderness Safari, staying in campsites, from £1898 per person. Considerably cheaper than most camps is Oddball's Palm Island where guests sleep on bedrolls in dome tents and bring their own sleeping bags. From £105 per night per person, through Okavango Tours & Expeditions (0208 343 3283).