Blog Aug Botswana | zoologist

Blog 41 – Aug '17 – The Botswana Chapter

I’ve probably said it before (and if I had fast enough internet I could check past blogs and avoid the repetition, but some things aren’t meant to be) but it was in Botswana that my love of Africa started. I have a vague recollection of feeling at home. Despite being thousands of kilometres from home, and on my first trip to Africa, 12-year-old me was pretty smitten. The animals were absolutely enchanting and the people all knew so many facts about them. These people dedicated their jobs, and often their lives, to understanding animals and looking after them (mostly from afar, because despite the enchantment, most of the animals are pretty scary up close). I didn’t know it then - and in fact, the research has only just come out - but Botswana is a complete overachiever when it comes to conservation, while Australia is a complete underachiever*, but that is a topic for another blog. Perhaps my 12-year-old self could sense this. Either that, or coming eye-to-eye with a leopard, on a pretty swanky safari, was enough to bond me to this continent for life. And in a weird twist of fate, or perhaps more correctly – after 17 years of hard work, dedicating far more time to study than I could have ever imagined at age 12 – I am now a resident of Botswana!

*To read more about this check out this article

What’s not to love?

Admittedly, I started this year thinking it was the year of Zambia. But, realising that I am not made for sitting behind a desk, with a whole national park around me and no time to explore it (and that that was exactly what my job had morphed into), I made the choice in April that I needed a move. The plan was to spend some time reassessing and madly looking for jobs over the coming months and then resort to a move back home until I found a job. But, a job looking for someone with management experience, animal behaviour research knowledge, and an ability to live remotely, came up. And in Botswana! It was like it was made for me. So, after a month’s notice period and a month’s holiday through the Balkans (travel bug is officially in good stead), I arrived in Botswana. The arrival process was a little (or a lot) bumpy and very muddy thanks to roads that were far worse than I would have expected of Botswana. But in 2 days I had made the journey from Lusaka to Maun, my new base town. Maun is a fairly small town with only ~50,000 people. Its main purpose is to serve the tourists coming through for the Okavango Delta. The delta is one of the largest inland deltas in the world and a treasure trove of animals, so a town just for tourism is completely necessary. On drawing into the town, a herd of cows and few donkeys blocked my car’s path and it became pretty clear that this was no metropolis. So, the nightmarish traffic of Lusaka is now a distant memory. Although, so are the multicultural restaurants, shops and cinemas. But, you win some, and you lose some.

Not the smoothest arrival into Botswana

The evening of my arrival, I was invited to a night out at what seems to be an Indian restaurant or game meat braai restaurant, depending which table you chose. The place has a small, but bright red, aeroplane secured above the open seating area, a deck that becomes a dance floor on ‘big’ nights and a bar seemingly held up by expats. I have come to learn that this is ‘the’ evening spot in Maun. And, although my first night was quite a blur thanks to having travelled from Croatia-Lusaka-Maun in three days, it was a great welcome. There seems to be a much more cohesive research community –and seemingly separate bush pilot and tourism operator communities – compared to Zambia. This is pretty vital seeing as I am so far from home, and have found myself needing to find a new community (again!) that will act as my Batswana** family. The night of curry, drinks, live music and some pretty intense dancing (only observed by me, who by that point was barely able to stand upright thanks to travel-lag!) made this, my most recent country hop, seem like a good one!

** Batswana is the collective noun for people from Botswana, while the singular form of the word is Motswana.

I am now working for Elephants for Africa (www.elephantsforafrica.org), a UK and Batswana NGO dedicated to reducing human-elephant conflict through research, community work and education. I’ve been in the job a little over a month, and no day has been remotely the same as the last. I’ve spent days out in the park researching, out in the community conducting questionnaires, in the office creating policies and procedures, with school kids leading environmental clubs, under our research vehicle greasing prop shafts and doing basic mechanical checks, applying for funding, piloting a tinnie across the now flowing Boteti River, meeting Khosis (Chiefs), attending town halls, and putting on community documentary nights. So, there has been no chance to get bored, which is great! The ability to get away from my desk for at least some time most days has been a great change and one that has let me interact with so many people from vastly different walks of life.

In future blogs, I’ll give you more of an idea of what Elephants for Africa does and why working on human-elephant conflict mitigation is so important, and particularly so in our area.

I’ve traded in wildebeests, then rangers, for these guys