Ask for a glass of sherry at the Duck Inn at 10 in the morning and Bernadette, who runs the place, will wish to know whether you prefer cream or dry.
The Duck Inn is not an inn but a bar, abutting the airport of this booming Kalahari sandveldt town of 20,000, about 200 of them Europeans. It is patronized by bush pilots, white hunters, itinerant journalists, business types, mysterious women, government officials, an occasional terrorist incognito and safari clients; and if Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet shared the same table, they would fit right in.
To the north, the Okavango River, southern Africa`s largest, runs down cold and clear from the mountains of Angola, spreads itself into a hand-shaped delta and disappears in the sugar-white Kalahari sands, creating perhaps the world`s greatest natural wildlife preserve.
Bernadette wears a crisp white blouse, her auburn curls meticulously set, and in her blue eyes is the wisdom a Frenchwoman acquires managing a saloon about 5,000 miles due south of Paris.
An intriguing couple
Among its customers one June morning was a tall, dark, beautiful young woman greatly resembling Kelly McGillis, and her escort, a man not quite her height but surely twice her age, vaguely ducal and Belgian in a Savile Row suit, carrying a rifle in a lambskin case. Shooting safaris start at about $1,000 a day. Their pilot arrived to fly them into the bush as the cream sherry reached our table.
Africa, the continuing evocation of the innocent paradise of Adam and Eve, must be the ultimate romantic destination. And Botswana, about the size of France, with a population of only about 1.2 million, is acessible, yet remote.
Unlike Kenya, where the sightseeing buses not infrequently chase each other into traffic jams around the lion kills and hippo wallows, the Okavango delta is wild, and clients go for days without seeing another party.
Maun is a 200-mile flight from Gabarone, the capital, where your British Air flight from London stops. You get into the delta by Northern Air, rugged, reliable, four-place, single-engine Cessnas, buzzing hippos, cape buffalo, elephants and crocodiles en route, and when the plane`s motor stops at the end of a grass airstrip under a wine-glass acacia thorn tree, the silence is engulfing.
Sounds of ”civilization”
How long has it been since you have been outside the sound of motors-jet aircraft, air conditioning, cars, refrigerators, pumps, traffic? ”Civilized” communities are inescapably buzzing, roaring and humming. In the Okavango, the very heart of southern Africa, there is the silence of primeval time, with impala, that most graceful of antelopes, grazing peacefully at the edge of the runway.
Toyota Land Cruisers, reliable four-wheel-drive almost amphibian open eight-passenger trucks, are the vehicle of choice here. Sande Greer, who is from Connecticut, and his Danish-English wife, author Karen Ross, who are our hosts, meet us in one and drive us to camp.
The bar is open-it never really closes on safari. As the stars replace the sunset afterglow, over a glass of 12-year-old Scotch (a splash of water, no ice), you see the Southern Cross.
We sleep on innerspring mattresses in wooden-decked, insect-proof, immaculate tents, with storage-battery electricity and flush toilets and hot showers. To Americans accustomed to their own rugged traditions of camping, the conditions of safari-which include liveried waiters and daily baked home- made bread, would demoralize a Methodist.
Camera is mandatory
But it is the wildlife, not the luxury or the food, that you came to see and photograph. Even if your camera work tends to the amateur, anybody with a reasonably good Nikon, Canon, Minolta or other standard single-lens reflex camera with a 200 mm zoom lens is going to bring back dramatic pictures.
If you can handle a 600 mm affixed firmly to the truck, you are going to make truly remarkable photos.
Picture-taking can intrude. The memories are what matter; memories such as:
– On that first night, we were awakened by a thunder of hooves out of a Western movie. From the tent porch, the battery-powered sealed beam flood lit hundreds of zebra, less than 50 feet away, moving through the dark, their eyes like scattered pairs of jewels.
– Fifteen elephants, including four little calves, easily and deliberately crossing a small river, invincible and seemingly invulnerable, their great size matched by their fearless dignity. (Botswana has a surplus of elephants and permits hunting them. Its wildlife preservation programs are rated with South Africa`s as the best on the continent.)
– The lions roaring on all sides at night and the hippos basso profundo grunt-bellowing, close to the tents.
– Following a black-maned lion and his lioness for 40 minutes at dusk one day at Machaba Camp, and watching these magnificent creatures couple twice in that time and curiously, catlike, approached within 10 feet of the Toyota.
The animals don`t bother with the tents and have learned that the Toyotas and Land Rovers are inedible and harmless. This makes it possible for a skilled driver/tracker to get remarkably close to them without alarming them or endangering the passengers.
Simple personal gear
You have to have a lot of immunizations to go to Africa, but Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, for example, maintains a superb walk-in clinic, which will provide immunizations with great expertise for anyplace on earth for about $100 plus pharmaceuticals, depending on where you are going. You don`t need any special clothing for safari; a couple of pairs of canvas shoes, shorts or slacks, cotton shirts, warm sweater and light nylon shell will handle most weather conditions. A pocket flashlight, analgesics and anti-diarrhetics are sensible items for a survival kit anywhere.
To leave Botswana without seeing Victoria Falls, David Livingstone`s
”smoke that thunders,” is a mistake; and Ker Downey Selby, the storied safari firm that took care of us, makes the appropriate arrangements.
In view of the magnificent, Edwardian/modern Victoria Falls Hotel, in Zimbabwe just across the falls from Zambia, the Zambezi River plunges more than 300 feet down from a mile-wide escarpment, greater than Niagara. You can see it from the ground or fly over it; and the hotel`s excellent dining room will provide you with Zambezi crocodile tail with bearnaise sauce if you want to do it right.
The falls are a regular destination for European tourists and a great place to shop for African artifacts. You get there and return from Gabarone via Air Botswana and thence to London and home.
Ker Downey Selby has illustrious clients from Hollywood and the Social Register Burke`s and DeBrett. Any good travel agency can put you in touch. Inquiries also can be directed to Suzanne Triplett, KDS, Suite 504, 7701 Wilshire Pl., Houston, Tex. 77047; 800-231-6352.
Cost is a bargain
The charge for nine days on safari, the usual initiation, is $1,935 a person, which may seem steep. But the cost includes everything, a lot of light-plane air fare, all-gourmet meals with wine, land cruisers, baggage handling, lodging and all the expert guiding you can handle. Tipping is expected at the end of each of three camp stays.
You could not live in a first-class hotel and dine out for three meals a day for nine days for the safari price. The Victoria Falls excursion, air fare and hotel, really mandatory, would be about $500 extra, and round-trip air fare to Gabarone via British Airways coach would run about $2,400.
The total, in the neighborhood of $5,000, including a stopover in London and all the film you can burn, is unquestionably a lot of money. Not bad in the footsteps of Hemingway, Kipling, Churchill and Ruark, not to mention Ava Gardner, Sinatra, Eastwood, Redford and Ted Turner. –
