The Okavango River - Part 2

The drive to Guma Lagoon, our next stop, brought this home to us with a vengeance. It took all of Stuart's driving skills to get us the 15 km to the camp far in the back of beyond, off the tar road and down a criss-cross of deep sandy tracks. If I hadn't had the experience of driving in Dubai I would have worried, as it was I was pretty apprehensive as we had not let the air out of our tires and there were marshy bits in between. It took a long time of driving in low ratio but we got there, really aware of the reality of sand along the river now.

At Guma Lagoon camp the river widened out and split, so that the lagoon is actually part of the Taoghe river rather than the Okavango, which carries on further East. The water was high, a result of the rains in the Angolan highlands, which feed into the rivers further South, filling them up four months later, so even though we are in the dry season there is a lot of water in the lagoon. The fertile areas of the delta don't reach as far out into the surrounding landscape as they do in Egypt along the Nile, but they are also not as sharply delineated, seeming to fade into the desert gradually.

After a few days of chilling and capturing footage, we took a boat ride out into the swamps. We took off with our guide Cobra in a small metal boat across the lagoon at about 4pm. The sun was just getting low enough so that the light turned soft and mellow and the lagoon lay blue and flat ahead of us, flanked by green papyrus reed beds, holding unseen animal treasures. We first went down along the reeds we had seen from our view point on the deck of the camp to look at the papyrus more closely. Apparently both the roots and the inside of the stalks are edible and a bushel of reeds can be strapped together to make an impromptu boat to transport people and goods across the channels when it gets too deep to walk. So there is more to papyrus than making paper. I have been fascinated by the papyrus, as it really looks like the drawings in Egyptian tombs, only three dimensional. They are very tall, about 4 meters and have graceful feathery tops.

We also saw day lilies floating on the water next to their plate shaped leaves, their petals shining white and pale blue to fading purple to pink against the dark water. The water was very clear so we could see the tangled nest of roots and dead reeds down in the depths, luckily no hippos under the surface (which can tip a boat if scared by an engine) or crocs (who are only dangerous once you're in the water - like when your boat got tipped by a hippo). As we went along the channel became narrower and the tall greenery on either side of us began to close in. The papyrus towering over us was only occasionally interrupted by islands lined with palms, Baobabs and Mopane trees, their roots holding the sand when the annual floods threaten to carry them off. In the lower tangle of stalks we saw king fisher, heron and other small birds, and later we were dive bombed by a bat picking off insects that come out in the late afternoon.

Occasionally the guide would stop the boat to show us something he had discovered in the reeds, a bird or a flower or a small croc. Once the engine was cut we would drift until he managed to restart the battered old outboard. At one point we stopped next to a sandy slope between two gnarly liana-laden trees. On the soft bank lay a massive brown crocodile, probably three meters long, tail curled in, apparently asleep, looking exactly like the Peter Pan croc. It was all very exciting for us, we were taking photos and filming intently, marvelling at the size and scaliness of the animal, its stillness - probably waiting for a bird to mistake it for a log - and all the time the boat was drifting closer to the water's edge. Kobra restarted the engine, or tried to. As he was yanking the starter I felt Stuart, who was closest to land, edging towards me. Suddenly the croc, with an almighty swoosh, snapped its head around, obviously deciding we had outstayed our welcome. We all nearly dropped our cameras at the lightning fast action of this seemingly lumbering giant. We had just been discussing how something that size could be fast enough to catch a bird. Now we knew. Hearts pumping with adrenaline, we were glad to hear the engine finally coming to life, just before we bumped into shore and within range of a big and very grumpy croc.

The amazing bird life has made Stuart very happy, he is ticking sightings off his list with a vengeance and when he met a fellow twitcher here in Maun he was in heaven, exchanging names and puzzling out mysterious birds he had not been able to identify. We are hoping to see more birds when we get to Moremi Park tomorrow.