Zim and Meltdowns

We’re driving south from Francistown, Botswana to the Tuli Block, a large conservation area on the great, greasy Limpopo River (my best beloved) on the Botswana/South Africa border. We left Zimbabwe back to Botswana in a collective snit. The snit itself wasn’t Zim’s fault – more a sudden realisation that camping and careening around Southern Africa with 3 kids was a lot of work and that we weren’t really taking the time to relax and enjoy ourselves or each other’s company. We keep breaking the “3 night rule” and doing one night stops which adds to the “workload” and stress enormously. So we’ve made a whole new set of commitments that we’ll honour for a week or so until our next crisis… If you’re brave enough to ever do something like this: DO NOT PUSH TOO HARD and try to do and see it all! It works for a little while and then the fragile balance is destroyed as the entire family spectacularly explodes in a confined space. Highly entertaining stuff.

Fiona and I both really wanted to like Zimbabwe. We didn’t, sadly. There’s an unpleasant vibe in Zimbabwe. All the politics aside, people are stressed out just trying to survive. To be fair, it is nowhere near as bad as the western press would have one believe but we didn’t think it would be – we were expecting to be pleasantly surprised and we weren’t. One nighters were a necessity in Zimbabwe as we really didn’t want to stay more than one night in most of the places we visited. Zim is run down… really run down. I suppose it didn’t help that we stayed in National Parks – private camps might have been better. The facilities hadn’t seen any other form of maintenance, I’m guessing here, since 1975. No handles on toilets, no heads on showers, no tiles on shower walls… just run down and pretty revolting – and we’ve developed a pretty high tolerance to these things. What makes this truly sad is that Hwange National Park is awesome (excepting the aforementioned facilities). Again, with their heads in the sand, the Zimbabweans somewhat wishfully think that they can charge (relatively high) South African rates – and then wonder why there’s no one visiting the country. Ciao for now Zim. We may venture back to go to Kariba as we’ve heard such great things about the place but it may be a tough sell…

So we’re back in Botswana after a bolt through Zim from Vic Falls to Hwange through Bulawayo and back across the border… We felt we gave Botswana short shrift the first time around – and we really want to see more of it.

The only annoyance in Botswana is the veterinary fences that spring up all over the place. The authorities are trying to stop the spread of foot and mouth disease but it seems every time we stock up our fridge with meat and milk it gets confiscated again. And we have no idea where these fences are so can’t really plan around them. The kind authorities do give us the option to “boil the meat” roadside at the checkpoint but I’m not sure how boiled fillet or boerwors tastes. They’re amazed that we don’t want to take this sumptuous option and thus have to burn the meat at the roadside under their supervision. Of course, this being Africa, we have to supply the matches and kindling to facilitate the burning. We’re starting to get a bit sneaky and have been hiding meat in the roof tent but that’s a bit problematic as eventually blood starts to trickle down the side of the car raising other more serious suspicions at checkpoints.

We’ve almost been travelling for a month now. Last night we went back through all our photos and videos. It is amazing what we have seen and done so far with so much more ahead.