This place is so beautiful in a totally different way than the Kalahari. I can’t believe we’re only 100 miles away. There is water everywhere here, fresh, and clean. You can drink right out of the delta, assuming the hippos and crocs don’t get you.

The only practical way here is to fly in. There are more Cessna 206′s flying into Maun airport than just about anywhere else in the world. They deliver packages, food, and mail to the two dozen camps in the delta area.

While we were on the runway, a truck pulled up and asked us if we were going to Shinde. We said yes and they proceeded to unload about 120lbs of fresh veggies and mail to take out to the camp. Luckily we had a group of four planes, so we all took a share of the veggies and I took the mail. Now I’m an official African Bush mail pilot!

There are game animals and predators everywhere. The place we are going, the Shinde lodge, is a collection of tents. Five star tents, built on teak platforms with lots of running water, hot showers, excellent cooking, and lots of alcohol. The British who colonized Africa must have been major drunks, because there are so many artificial drinking events (every evening has a Sundowner, where you stop, watch the sun going down, and break out the gin and tonics).

Went out on a boat into the delta and got some good photos of birds and hippos, otherwise not much on the first night. Saw two hippos fighting each other in the water. They are insanely fast. No matter how stupid they look on land, you do not want to screw with a hippo in the water.

Do not piss off the hippos. I got the shot and we ran.

Spoke to a few of our guides about life in Botswana. They have a lot to be proud of and they put a lot of faith in their government, which seems to be about as benign a government as you can get. The Botswana way is to work through collaboration and community, and people seem to cut each other a lot of slack.

There are private concessions here that manage the delta resources. They’re given 15 year leases on the land, and the bids for the leases is extremely competitive (sealed blind bids). They typically include packages to support the local communities and their infrastructure, have strict conservation pledges, social pledges (bringing Botswanan kids out to the delta for field trips) and pay a fair bit of taxes to the central government which is redistributed into the education system. They realize that Ecotourism is the way to go, and the government appears to be fostering that transition in a free-market way that still benefits the locals.

Botswana is missing something that SA has in abundance, razor wire. In SA. I felt like we were moving from compound to compound through a war zone. There is almost no crime here because a pickpocket or thief, if one is stupid enough to commit a crime, is going to get his ass kicked by everyone around that hears a shout of alarm.

This morning, we woke up, and a hippo was walking by our tent, not 15 feet away. We went out on the deck and watched it. it looked at us, and we all decided it was too early in the morning to kill each other, which was a good thing, because hippos can be insane and violent. Oh, you can’t help but laugh when you see one walking on land. I can’t describe it but it’s totally comical.