Okavango I

It is difficult to write about the Okavango Delta.

Why?

There's nothing else like it in the world. It is truly one-of-a-kind; a unique natural phenomenon on a huge scale, something for which there is really no comparison. It is also an extremely seasonal event – I've seen it now, at the start of the flood and beginning of the dry season, but it's a completely different landscape at other times of the year, just as much as a forest in North America that goes from barren, snow-covered skeletons to lush greenery as the seasons progress. It seems, in a sense, misleading to write about my little slice of the delta – an inadequate sliver of time, an inadequate sliver of the land itself.

Let me start with a brief summary of the flood. The Okavango River begins in the highlands of Angola, where rainfalls swell the waters of the Okavango and send it rushing south into Botswana. The flood pours across the border and hits the Delta – the flat, dry, sandy northern end of the Kalahari Desert. Confronted by this, the river slows and spreads in a clean sheet of water across the sand, filling shallow channels, submerging termite mounds, and kick-starting an orgy of growth. The animals follow – the birds, winging in from other parts of the continent. Elephants, migrating towards the water they know will be there. Every thirsty creature relaxes and sates themselves in the flood, from zebra to lion to the fish that tumble downstream with the river and wind up swimming in the sinuous loops of hippo trails.

Typical image of the Delta – the green areas in the foreground are completely flooded, just overgrown with reeds. The lines in the water are all animal trails, mostly hippo and elephant as they make their way through the swamp.

The amount of water that is poured out on the Delta is also something to wonder at – 15,000 square kilometres of desert are affected, with 11 cubic kilometres of water pouring over it. For the Americans, that's 264,172,052,360 gallons, or over two hundred and sixty-four BILLION gallons of water. For those of us wisely using the metric system, it's one TRILLION litres. A more visual example – it's enough water to cover the entire island of Manhattan to a depth of 615 feet, or 187m. All of this water is poured out across the desert. At different times of year, islands will disappear and reappear; endless lagoons will dry out and sift with dust; trees will crackle with dryness and then swim in three feet of water. Papyrus rafts grow, float, anchor, and float again. Elephants churn the sand into a slow cloud as they make their way to the river, then joyously bathe themselves in mud and spout streams of water from their trunks.


It's not a rainforest, by any means; there are few tall trees, no curtains of moss nor verdant orchid-filled canopies. After all, even with the water flowing around their roots, these plants are still beaten by the blinding Botswana sunlight, and the water doesn't stay all year.

The wonder is in the waterways, the swamps and lagoons, the endless frayed fields of green that seem solid until you see a hippo wade out from the reeds and realize that it's all the same continuous expanse of water. Gain a little elevation and you start to see the darker twists and trails of hippo paths on the bottoms of the channels – the lines carved as they walk along the bottom, munching weeds and then emerging to trundle through the papyrus towards solid ground and better grazing. From an airplane the endless network and pattern of animal trails is stunningly clear, branching like spiderwebs away from the nodes of solid islands. The shapes of elephants are obvious, like giant boulders clustered around trees, and the light darting herds of impala gleam red against the grasses. You can see everything.

Get even a few hundred meters away from the water, though, and it will be this again:


Dry, low acacia bushes, sand and rocks and thorns. It's a fragile miracle, a precious sheet of moisture in the parched Kalahari. But for many kilometres around the water you'll find the animals – as long as they can get back to the river to drink.

Maun is at the southern end of the Delta, and the river there is beautiful – hippos and crocodiles sun themselves on the bank next to one of my favourite restaurants, the occasional elephant will trod through the fields, and every once in awhile you can hear a leopard coughing. But it isn't the Delta, the real Delta, the wild infinity of lagoon and twisted lily-choked channels. I entered the real Delta for the first time on the eleventh of June, 2009.

--- Brevity is a virtue! To be continued. ---