I have been fortunate enough to travel in Botswana for two decades and I intend to continue to do so. My travels in Botswana began as a jumping off point between Vic Falls and Windhoek and evolved into a place where my young son attended school in the frontier town of Maun. The French have a name for it, La mal d‘Afrique, and whatever the illness consists of I have had it since I was 8 or 9 years old. They say wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow but Africa was a part of me before I started High School in England. As Judith Thurman so rightly said “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” So my African journey began in East Africa in 1987 and continued to southern Africa. In the early 1990s I was returning from Caprivi with two couples who had been kind enough to offer me a lift back to the Falls. The Border posts in Africa, like the National Parks, close at sunset, and we were just too late to cross back into Zimbabwe that evening. In those days there were no designated camp sites and visitors could camp at any chosen spot, so we camped as close to the border as we could. One couple had the back of the Land Rover, the other couple had the roof tent and I, as an unexpected guest, had the front seats with the gear shift in my ribs. But I had learnt to ‘stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey’. As I dozed to the sound of drums from the nearby village and hyenas around Kazungula the Landi suspension lurched followed by a scream and a yell. We got out of the vehicle pretty fast to find one guy on the floor at the front of the Landi and one very distraught wife on the roof. He had quietly left the tent to relieve himself and was just climbing onto the bonnet to re-join his wife in the roof tent when she felt the bonnet dip and didn’t realise he had left the tent. So being a courageous traveller, she steadied herself on her elbows and waited for ‘hyena’ to stick its head through the tent . . . and BAM! She kicked her husband right off the bonnet. Ibn Battuta is correct in saying “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
Time passed and I met my son’s father and my son and I returned to the Falls from England when he was 18 months old. We continued to travel southern Africa alone and I taught him the only thing you need to be afraid of in the Bush is yourself. My sense of adventure didn’t fade, although often it was my four year old who would tell me which side of the ant hill we should drive to get home. He may as well have said ‘let's find some beautiful place to get lost in today’. Now, he’s much older and, occasionally loses his sense of humour, he’ll tell me ‘I don’t want one of your adventures today, let’s take the route we know’. We had some great adventures in Botswana and met some fantastic people.
Wind forward until my son was 17, when he loaded with a tent a 125cc motorbike and set off to the Kalahari with one friend on a similar bike. The vast distances of the Kalahari desert extend 900,000 square kilometres, covering much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa. My son brought back footage of an extremely tough motorbike ride through tracks of 12 inches of sand. Apparently “life begins at the end of your comfort zone,” and it certainly did for him.
Clearly the proverb “Travel doesn't become adventure until you leave yourself behind” began before my son’s first solo journey and he continues to travel to this day. For in Africa “you can shake the sand from your shoes, but not from your soul.”
