Khama Rhino Preserve

*apologies, the formatting is crummy... oh well*

[Picture Left: Sometimes, you have to hitchhike]

Greetings and salutations! Last weekend (January 26/26), 12 of us scheduled a trip to Serowe, which is about four hours north of Gaborone. The trip went wonderfully, and I got a lot of great shots.

The bus ride was interesting… the whole thing seemed to be rigged to get you to buy things, but in the end you get your money’s worth. For example, when you go to the bus station, the walkway from the city busses to the regional busses is lined with vendors. Then, when you sit down in the traveling bus, 15 vendors get on the bus with you and walk up and down the aisles, displaying goods (in your face). Then, at each bus stop, vendors run up to the sides of the bus and hold baskets full of food and other goodies up to the windows. Also, if you pay more than the price of the trip, you might not get your change for a while… but somehow you eventually do. All told, the busses here are incredibly cheap compared to the U.S.

[Picture Right: Some "springbok" at the preserve]

So we showed up in Serowe, but we still had to get to the Khama Rhino Preserve. So we went up to the “combi” parking lot to find a combi driver who might want to make a special trip off the regular route (nobody is really sure if there’s a central regulating “combi association” or something… most evidence points to “no”). First, we were surrounded by 20 combi drivers who wondered what 12 white kids were doing in Serowe… with a little negotiating, we found our man. His combi came equipped with an awesome sound system, so we rolled into the Rhino Preserve surreally listening to Sean Kingston (that zeppelin cover).

Our accommodations were incredible. The ‘chalet’ was a wood-frame house, thatched in the Boer style, with a kitchen and a loft. There was running water outside, and a 50-gallon(ish) drum above a wood fire for hot showers in the morning. It was pretty nice. Including two nights, hot water (well, the firemaster never actually showed up), transportation, gas lamps (fun!), hospitality, and a wildlife tour, the whole weekend was about $70 USD. If it was “ecotourism”, we all loved it.

[Picture Right: Zebras, wildebeest (sp?), and something else]

As for life around UB this past week, two really interesting things have happened: 1) I’m friends with an international celebrity, and 2) Debate might serve a social function. The celebrity is named Justice and he was on the African Big Brother in South Africa last fall. He’s pretty cool & I think he might be kinda relieved that we know him outside of a celebrity context. His big things are journalism and debate, which brings me to number two. I met some guys on Saturday for an interview on globalization (it was amazing) for the ACM class, and it turns out they’re all parliamentary debate nerds, so they took us out to a braii (barbeque) on Saturday and we had a smashing good time. There was supposed to be practice on Sunday, but I guess it got Botswana’timed (postponed until next week), so I’ll keep you posted.

[Picture Left: Rhino kind of chargin!]

One final note: Setswana is really taking off -- we’re learning grammar and sentence structure and everything. I should be fluent by March! (obviously that’s impossible). The word of the day is: Moritshana, which means “the lid of a three-legged pot”. It’s interesting to see what words have evolved out of practical necessity in English, Spanish and Setswana.

[Picture Left: The preserve at the end of our drive (digitally enhanced). Picture Right: Khama Rhino Preserve en majestie.]

To add further drama to the post, I would like to point out that the accommodations are IN the preserve. The next morning we were told that the hoof-prints of the black rhino named Naughty were all around our campsite...