Photos - Huiku & Kanana

Flower at Gam Xho (Huiku camp site)

Two posts in quick succession! What's going on here? Well! As I wrote at the bottom of the last entry, the internet here has been an absolute disaster, and in the past 2 weeks when it's come on, blog-updating has been a low priority. Now it seems to be back, so I'm going to start madly posting to make up for lost time.

View from the top of the rocky outcropping, Huiku camp site

Two weeks ago, we took the Huiku board members out to Gam Xho to look around and make some decisions about how we want to situate the camp site. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the area is still lush and green from the rains. Too many rains, actually - it's unusual for the rainy season to last this long, and though it's good for the animals, it's starting to drive me crazy. Despite coming from one of the rainiest places in the world, this grey weather is wearing on my nerves. I'm in Botswana! The weather shouldn't be like this! It's pouring rain as I type this, and it's been dreary and grey continuously since Saturday. Even in the height of the rainy season, that would be strange; generally the rain will pour for a few hours in the afternoon, and the sun will be out the rest of the time. This has been steady cloud and rain for almost three days straight. It doesn't bode well for winter.

Board members sitting on Gam Xho

Fossil river bed, Huiku camp site

Typical camping set-up; this is in Grootlaagte, at the Huiku office

Luckily, it was quite dry two weeks ago when the above picture was taken - though we didn't have such good luck last week, when torrential rains struck at 3:30 a.m. and soaked through the board members' tents!

The above is a fairly typical camping scene - tent in the background, heating water for a bath, stirring or morning activity. Let me go through it, item by item:
(1) The yellow container in the front is full of water; there isn't a tap on the Huiku office plot yet, so we get water from the tap outside the kgosi's office, and carry it over in a plastic jerrycan.
(2) The sheet of corrugated tin on the left acts as a windbreak. I have no idea where it came from, but it shelters the fire.
(3) Next to the metal sheet, a small 3-legged iron pot, used for cooking EVERYTHING. It just sits in the fire on its little legs. These things are very heavy and do a good job of cooking most foods.
(4) To the right of the 3-legged pot, a fire-blackened Ricoffy instant coffee tin. This tin is being used to heat water for a bath. Once heated, the water will be poured into a big plastic bathtub, topped up with cold water, and a bath will be had!
(5) Really long log. Also typical; nobody has an axe, so long logs are just fed into the fire a bit at a time. It's generally so dry in the Kalahari that this works very well - there's no need to construct heat-conserving teepees or criss-crossed towers.
(6) Man drinking tea. He is sitting on a stone, I think.

Motswiri Lodge, Kanana

The other reason for my break in blog posts is that I've been spending most of my weekends away from D'Kar. Why? Because I've been beg-borrow-and-stealing lifts up to Kanana, to spend time with my boyfriend, A. He works on Kanana, which is a game farm on the way to Grootlaagte.

I waded out into the pan to take this picture; it is a shallow, temporary natural pan, and never becomes more than 2 feet deep.

Sunset view. I'm going to miss these Kalahari colours.

That's all for now, folks!